Skip to main content
https://www.highperformancecpmgate.com/rgeesizw1?key=a9d7b2ab045c91688419e8e18a006621

Adobe’s ‘Liquid Mode’ uses AI to automatically redesign PDFs for mobile devices

We’ve probably all been there: you’ve been poking around your phone for an hour, deep in some sort of Google research rabbit hole. You finally find a link that almost certainly has the info you’ve been looking for. You tap it.. aaaand it’s a fifty page PDF. Now you get to pinch and zoom your way through a document that’s clearly not meant for a screen that fits in your hand.

Given that the file format is approaching its 30th birthday, it makes sense that PDFs aren’t exactly built for modern mobile devices. But neither PDFs or smartphones are going away anytime soon, so Adobe has been working on a way to make them play nicely together.

This morning Adobe is launching a feature it calls “Liquid Mode.” Liquid Mode taps Adobe’s AI engine, Sensei, to analyze a PDF and automatically rebuild it for mobile devices. It uses machine learning to chew through the PDF and try to work out what’s what — like the font changes that indicate a new section is starting, or how data is being displayed in a table — and reflow it all for smaller screens.

After a few months of quiet testing, Liquid Mode is being publicly rolled out in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader app for iOS and Android today with plans to bring it to desktops later. Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis also tells me they’ve been working on an API that’ll allow similar functionality to be rolled into non-Adobe apps down the road.

When you open a PDF in Acrobat Reader, the app will try to determine if it’ll work with Liquid Mode; if so, the Liquid Mode button lights up. Tap the button and the file is sent to Adobe’s Document Cloud for processing. Once complete, users can tweak things like the font size and line spacing to their liking. Liquid Mode will use the headers/structure it detects to build a tappable table of contents where none existed before, allowing you to quickly hop from section to section. The whole thing is non-destructive, so nothing actually changes about the original PDF. Step back out of liquid mode, and you’re back at the original, unmodified PDF. 

Image Credits: Adobe

We first heard about Adobe’s efforts here earlier this year; in an ExtraCrunch interview back in January, Parasnis outlined Adobe’s plans to bring AI and machine learning into just about everything the company does. Parasnis tells me that Liquid Mode is just the first step in giving Sensei an understanding of documents. Later, he notes, they want users to be able to hand Sensei a thirty page PDF and have it return a summary just a few pages long.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp steps back from board director role

Uber co-founder Garrett Camp is relinquishing his role as a board director and switching to board observer — where he says he’ll focus on product strategy for the ride hailing giant. Camp made the announcement in a short Medium post in which he writes of his decade at Uber: “I’ve learned a lot, and realized that I’m most helpful when focused on product strategy & design, and this is where I’d like to focus going forward.” “I will continue to work with Dara [Khosrowshahi, Uber CEO] and the product and technology leadership teams to brainstorm new ideas, iterate on plans and designs, and continue to innovate at scale,” he adds. “We have a strong and diverse team in place, and I’m confident everyone will navigate well during these turbulent times.” The Canadian billionaire entrepreneur signs off by saying he’s looking forward to helping Uber “brainstorm the next big idea”. Camp hasn’t been short of ideas over his career in tech. He’s the co-founder of the web 2.0 recommendatio...
Post a Comment
Read more

Leading VCs discuss how COVID-19 has impacted the world of digital health

In December 2019, Extra Crunch spoke to a group of investors leading the charge in health tech to discuss where they saw the most opportunity in the space leading into 2020 . At the time, respondents highlighted startups in digital therapeutics, telehealth and mental health that were improving medical practitioner efficiency or streamlining the distribution of care, amongst a variety of other digital health markets that were garnering the most attention. Where top VCs are investing in digital health In the months since, the COVID-19 crisis has debilitated national healthcare systems and the global economy. Weaknesses in healthcare systems have become clearer than ever, while startups and capital providers have struggled to operate while wide swaths of the market effectively shut down. Given significant volatility and the rapid changes seen in the worlds of healthcare, venture and startups broadly, we wanted to understand which inefficiencies might have been brought to light, w...
Post a Comment
Read more

News-reading app Flipboard expands local coverage, including coronavirus updates, to 12 more U.S. metros

Earlier this year, personalized news aggregation app Flipboard expanded into local news . The feature brought local news, sports, real estate, weather, transportation news and more to 23 cities across the U.S. Today, Flipboard is bringing local news to 12 more U.S. metros and is adding critical coronavirus local coverage to all of the 35 supported locales. The 12 new metros include the following:  Baltimore, Charlotte, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Nashville, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Raleigh, Salt Lake City, St. Louis, and Tampa Bay. They join the 23 cities that were already supported:  Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Toronto, Vancouver and Washington, D.C. To offer local news in its app, Flipboard works with area partners, big and small, like The Plain Dealer’s Cleveland.com , ...
Post a Comment
Read more