Intelligent Agent: Transforming Documents with AI & Voice

For the last three years, Adobe and Microsoft have been working together to make business processes more efficient for hundreds of millions of customers.

Adobe Sign is Microsoft’s preferred e-signature solution, allowing customers to sign, create forms and send documents from anywhere. And Microsoft Office 365 users can access Adobe PDF right from the online versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

With Microsoft, we’re not only giving customers the tools, apps and services they need today –we’re creating the innovation they’ll need for the workplace of the future.

Today at Adobe’s Summit Sneaks, we’ll be showcasing technology that pairs speech recognition functionality in Microsoft Cognitive Services with text analysis AI. Intelligent Agent is the combination of a smart voice assistant and a smart text analyst – in James Bond terms, kind of a cross between Moneypenny and Q.

We may not turn out spyware gadgets – like 007’s car invisibility cloak or tricked out Aston Martin – but Adobe is a veritable hotbed for innovation. Now in its eighth year, Sneaks gives Adobe engineers, researchers, product managers and UX designers an opportunity to submit proposals to present their work at Adobe Summit.

The Intelligent Agent Sneak is a great example of how we innovate at Adobe.

This technology extracts intelligence from documents to help people make better, faster decisions while they’re on the go. Users can talk to their documents and quickly surface relevant information. This technology has implications for anyone who deals with long form documents, including contracts and academic papers.

Let’s take a look at how it works.

Let’s say you’ve received a contract to buy some new office furniture. (Digital Media just moved into Adobe’s new Hooper building in San Francisco, so we’re set for new office furniture. But I digress.) It’s an Adobe Sign contract link in Outlook, which means it’s easy to review and sign – but the contract is super long, and I can’t find the prices!

“How much does this cost?” I ask the document. The Intelligent Agent, powered by AI, uses NLP (natural language processing) to translate the voice and turn my question into a semantic query to quickly search the document. Then I can ask a more complicated question:

“How does this pricing compare with the previous contract I had with this company?” The intelligent agent mines multiple documents in Document Cloud and provides recommendations on which documents to compare.

The document is then processed through semantic analysis using deep learning – and the intelligent agent highlights the price difference between the contracts. This all happens inside Adobe Acrobat Reader which is on more than a billion desktops and mobile devices worldwide.

As I mentioned, Intelligent Agent is a great example of how we innovate at Adobe. Several teams worked on the project, including marketing, design, engineering and product management, and it showcases the ingenuity of the Adobe community.

Sneaks may or may not become actual products, but we love to see what our employees are working on. At Adobe, we know that good ideas come from anywhere and everywhere.

Click here to learn more about Adobe Sign.