Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
TL; DR
- Google says Adobe is testing Gemini Nano support in Acrobat.
- Adobe Acrobat can use Gemini Nano to power generative AI functions on the device, such as summarization, which is part of the Acrobat AI Assistant tool.
- Patreon and Grammarly are also working on adding Gemini Nano-powered AI features to their apps.
Generative AI is the hottest trend in the tech sector, and there are no signs of it slowing down anytime soon. Last week, Google spent most of its money Google I/O 2024 keynote discussing the company's progress in AI. The company, of course, focused mainly on showing off its own AI products, but also spared some time to show off some of its partners' work. For example, Google teased the arrival of a new Acrobat AI Assistant experience, Abode's suite of generative AI features in Acrobat and Reader, which uses Twin Nano.
Twin, if you don't know, is the branding for Google's Large Language Model (LLM) and AI chatbot. There are several versions of the Gemini LLM: Nano, Pro and Ultra. Gemini Nano is the smallest and least complex of the three models, allowing it to be used on mobile devices such as the Google Pixel 8 Pro And Samsung Galaxy S24 series. While Gemini Nano isn't suited to tasks like powering a general-purpose AI chatbot, the current version is more than capable of handling small to medium blocks of text to provide summaries or suggested answers. That's exactly why Google uses it to power the on-device summary feature of the Pixel voice recorder app, as well as Gboard's smart replies in several messaging apps. Samsung also uses Gemini Nano to power some of its on-device devices Galaxy AI functions.
To ease the deployment of Gemini Nano on devices, Google has created a new system service in Android called AICore. AICore simplifies things for developers by handling Gemini Nano model downloads/updates and using on-device hardware to speed up inference when apps call the Gemini Nano API. This API can be called via the AI Edge SDK for Android, which is currently in private preview. During last week's “What's New in Android” presentation, Google revealed some of the companies it allowed to get early access to the AI Edge SDK for Android. These early adopters include Patreon, Grammarly, and of course Adobe.
Gemini Nano in Adobe Acrobat
Mishaal Rahman / Android Authority
While Google hasn't revealed how Patreon or Grammarly will use Gemini Nano, they did tease how Adobe plans to use it in Acrobat. From the short teaser we got, it looks like Adobe Acrobat will soon use Gemini Nano to summarize documents and let users ask questions about them. In the video Google played, Adobe's AI Assistant summarizes a PDF document titled “The Rise of Pickleball.” The demo shows a floating 'AI Assistant' button that, when tapped, generates a quick overview of the document. Below the overview there are some automatically generated follow-up questions that the user can tap, but there is also a text field where the user can ask questions about the document.
It's unclear how much of this experience will be powered by Gemini Nano on-device versus another model in the cloud. The AI Assistant in Adobe Acrobat is not new, but currently processes documents entirely in the cloud. Smaller models like Gemini Nano can't handle super long PDF documents like Gemini 1.5 Pro can, but they should be able to handle shorter documents. The exact word and page count of the PDF used in the demo was not shown, but the document appeared to be just over 20 pages. However, it's possible that the demo wasn't representative of the actual on-device capabilities of the upcoming AI Assistant update, so we'll have to wait and see how things go once it rolls out.
The future of Gemini Nano
Google is about to introduce a more powerful version of Gemini Nano called Gemini Nano with multimodalityabout the upcoming one Pixel 9 series. The current Gemini Nano models are available with a parameter size of 1.8 billion or 3.25 billion, while the new model has a parameter size of 3.8 billion and also supports audio and image processing. It's unclear if Adobe, Patreon, and Grammarly plan to leverage the upgraded model, but it will be interesting to see if they do. Hopefully Google will open up the AI Edge SDK for Android to all developers soon so we can see what kind of features they are building with Gemini Nano.