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Adobe has thrown its hat into the commercial artificial intelligence (AI) ring with the announcement of Adobe Sensei, the company’s new framework and set of intelligent services for designing and delivering digital experiences.
Sensei uses AI concepts of machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning capabilities and taps into Adobe’s deep trove of content, data assets and expertise to improve the Adobe customer experience across Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe Marketing Cloud and Adobe Document Cloud. It was announced at the Adobe MAX 2016 conference in San Diego.
“‘Sensei, ‘master’ or ‘teacher’ in Japanese, is the perfect term to describe the deep expertise in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning we have built into our platform,” said Abhay Parasnis, executive vice president and CTO of Adobe, in a blog post about the new technology. “AI and machine learning have become ubiquitous in the technology industry, and a lot of great work has been done to build out horizontal frameworks to solve large-scale problems – from accurate speech recognition to computer vision. Unlike these broad efforts, Adobe Sensei is unique in its approach to blending the science of data with the art of human creativity. It is focused solely and deeply on solving complex experience challenges in the markets we serve.”
For creative professionals, Adobe Sensei helps to automate mundane tasks. Indeed, Adobe has used AI and machine learning for many years within its creative applications to enable capabilities such as facial recognition, content-aware technologies and camera shake reduction, said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. New Adobe Creative Cloud features that tap Adobe Sensei include Adobe Stock Visual Search and Match Font and Face-Aware Liquify in Photoshop.
Moreover, Sensei’s Content Intelligence uses deep learning to search and tag images automatically and makes intelligent recommendations when a user searches for images. Face Aware Editing finds faces in an image and uses “landmarks” such as eyebrows, lips and eyes to understand their position and change the facial expression without ruining the image. Semantic Segmentation, meanwhile, shows each image region labeled with its type.
In Adobe Marketing Cloud, Sensei’s Intelligent Audience Segmentation gives marketers visibility into which segments are most important to their business and allows them to target overlapping or adjacent segments. A new Attribution capability helps marketers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns by algorithmically determining the impact of different marketing touch points on consumers’ decisions to engage with a brand, Adobe said. In Adobe Document Cloud, Sensei’s natural language-processing capability provides text understanding, topic modeling and sentiment analysis of digital documents, among other things.
“Adobe Sensei is uniquely focused on solving today’s complex experience challenges in the design, document and marketing fields, where only Adobe has decades of expertise and market leadership,” Narayen said in a statement. “Leveraging our machine learning and AI capabilities, as well as trillions of content and data assets, Adobe Sensei will be one of our biggest strategic investments.”
Narayen noted that Adobe will be opening Sensei up to its ecosystem of partners, ISVs and developers. Sensei will be available to partners and developers as APIs via Adobe.io, Adobe’s developer platform.