Adobe is giving PDFs a much-needed personality upgrade with a new generative AI tools added to Adobe Acrobat that let you turn dense documents into podcast-style audio summaries.
The headline feature is Generate Podcast, which does exactly what it sounds like. Feed Acrobat a document, which could be anything from meeting transcripts and lecture notes to long reports or study guides, and it will produce an audio summary designed to sound like a short podcast episode.
It’s aimed at people who’d rather listen than scroll, or who want to absorb information while commuting or multitasking.
Behind the scenes, Adobe says Generate Podcast currently relies on a Microsoft model for transcription and a Google voice model for narration, rather than Adobe’s own audio AI. That could change in the future, but for now it’s a pragmatic approach that gets the feature out the door. Similar tools exist elsewhere, like Google’s NotebookL, which has Audio Overviews, for example, but Acrobat has the advantage of already being where most people keep their PDFs.
Audio isn’t the only option. Acrobat Studio also introduces Generate Presentation, which turns documents into pitch decks by pulling out key insights and formatting them using Adobe Express templates. Users can let the AI handle everything automatically or jump in and tweak slides manually if something doesn’t look quite right.
These features sit alongside a more capable AI assistant that now supports chat-based PDF editing. Users can ask Acrobat to remove pages, rewrite text, delete comments or images, add signatures, or make layout changes just by describing what they want.
It’s worth noting that all of this lives in Acrobat Studio, which is separate from Adobe’s basic PDF reader and positioned as a more advanced, AI-powered document workspace.
Taken together, the update shows Adobe leaning hard into AI as a way to make PDFs less static and more flexible. Turning documents into something you can listen to or quickly present won’t be for everyone, but for students, professionals, and anyone drowning in long PDFs, it’s a genuinely useful shift.
And yes, it might finally make that 80-page report bearable.
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