Participating Frequently

Question

AI Assistant does not work on scanned PDFs???

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 15, 2024
4 replies
5578 views

I do not know if this is the correct forum, but whatever. I guess my last post was not posted in the right place and was moved but I cannot find it. Anyways... not only am I unable to find the AI Assistant on my ipad app, despite the fact that the app store has it advertised as available as does Adobe homepage, AND the posts here... and I have adobe pro and premium (yeh - thanks for that... I've been paying for both for TWO years after one of the services that used to be in adobe premium was used to pro, so I then had to buy Pro, yet Adobe NEVER told me that I was payinf for duplicative services, and despite my asking repeatedly over the years on the chat, I could never get a straight answer... so just TODAY, I learned that YES - as I suspected, I've been paying double for like two years and was never once informed... instead, I am constantly having to buy NEW plans to get services .... but I digress....) my complaint NPW is that I purchase AI assistant and I cannot use it on the IOS app on brand new updated ipad, and when I finally gave up and went to my chromebook to use through my creative cloud plan, it says "AI ASSISTANT DOES NOT WORK ON SCANNED PDFs"

WHAT?????

Then WHY would I need it??? And WHY IS THAT NOT STATED ANYWHERE IN ANY OF THE MULTIPLE ADS AND PROMOS FOR THE AI ASSISTANT?

I do not need to use AI assistant for my own PDFs. I need to use it for documents that are sent to me that I would like summaries of.... soooo..... seriously?? I do not understand the difference either. If the scanned PDF has been OCR'd, why doesn't AI Assistant work on it?

so frustrating.

Adobe is so, so, so frustrating and literally just continuously rips people off with false ads, switching services to "new plan", to forcing people to buy new plans without informing them of the fact that they are paying double if they don't cancel the otherplan. Like... WHY wouldn't my purchase of Adobe Pro not just have been an UPGRADE to my Adobe Premium plan?? WHY would adobe continue to bill be for that for YEARS?

and WHY convince me to buy Assistant without telling me that actually I CAN't use it on my ipad and I Can't use it on a scanned document. I spent SO MUCH TIME splitting the document up so I could at least meet the size limitations and WELP, THAT was a WASTE of time.

T

Tariq Ahmad

Community Manager

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the troubling experience.

Thanks for sharing your experiences with AI Assistant and scanned PDFs. I understand how frustrating it can be when a feature doesn’t work as expected, especially when it could significantly improve your workflow.

AI Assistant should be able to summarize text from scanned documents if OCR (Optical Character Recognition) has been applied, but there may be cases where it doesn't behave as expected. Let’s work together to troubleshoot this!

To help us better understand the issue, could you share:

Your workflow: Are you using Acrobat’s built-in Scan & OCR tool to convert the document into searchable text before using AI Assistant?
File type: Is your PDF purely an image, or does it already contain selectable text?
Error messages or behavior: Does AI Assistant display an error, remain unresponsive, or provide an incomplete summary?
Acrobat version: Are you on the latest version? (You can check this via Help > About Acrobat.)

If AI Assistant doesn’t summarise even after OCR is applied, we’d want to flag this for further investigation. Your insights are valuable in helping us improve the experience, so I appreciate your patience and input!

Looking forward to your responses, and thanks again for bringing this up!

More info on AI assistants can be found here: https://adobe.ly/42MbnTq;

If you could record a screen recording while working on a scanned document, that would help us look at exactly what you are experiencing. You may upload the video to any cloud drive and share the link with us.

Also, you may try using AI assistant on Acrobat Web at https://adobe.ly/412HEEa

~Tariq

J

Josiah27678768ugey

Participant

Hi I was having this issue too. What you If you click the advanced settings under recognize text and change it to editable it fixes it (at least for me). idk why but the default OCR setting isn't the one reason you'd wanna OCR. You may need to redownload the scan and then OCR it before opening the assistant panel

JR Boulay

Community Expert

You must OCRize your scanned PDFs, so that the AI can read their contents.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

GillianGahagan27

Participating Frequently

That doesn't work. I've scanned my PDF with OCR so the text is readable, and the AI assistant still says that it can't read scanned text.

M

mark_4809

Participant

For some reason, a few weeks ago, AI would work with non-OCR'd scans...Now I can't get it to work when the scans are OCR'd...

Liam79

Participant

In regard to Ai not working on scanned PDFs. What you could do is convert your scanned PDF into a Word document (in Acrobat) and then save the word document back into PDF. Then AI will be able to read it and that's how i get around it.

M

MindfulMountainAuthor

Participating Frequently

Not when it completely changes the entire formatting of the document and replaced fonts it doesn't recognize into random text. This is an absolutely ridiculous work around when a user needs to be able to use the simple AI tool on a scanned AND OCR'd PDF and the user NEEDS the document to remain in its original format. The fact that a program that specializes in handling and working with PDFs would need a work around like you have suggested, is just incomprehensible. - I'm Not saying your work around isn't clever and a helpful idea - I'm just saying that with the amount of money I have spent on Adobe, and the number of years it has been around, the number of glitches and failures it has, and the extreme lack of user-friendliness and all the extra charges I have paid and the number of times I have had to change or upgrade my plan - is just inexplicable and IS. NOT. OK.

PERIOD.

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