Adobe is working on a digital assistant that edits photos with voice commands

[sincity]

Have a collage you need cropped or a selfie that requires a little extra 'pop', but not so handy with image editing tools? What if the creators of Photoshop could let you enhance pictures using nothing more than your voice?

Adobe is working on a digital assistant designed to understand the "creative workflows and the creative aspirations" of its users - kind of like Apple's Siri or Google Assistant, but one that makes art instead of looking up movie showings. 

The company released a video demonstrating the voice-controlled assistant in action, which you can watch below:

While there's potential, the demonstration is brief and rather simplistic, with the user doing little more than flipping an already edited photo, cropping it, and posting it to Facebook with voice commands. Adobe does call this a first step, however, so it could become more robust as time goes on.

It's also unclear which applications in Adobe's Creative Suite will benefit from voice commands. Adobe appears focused solely on using the assistant for editing images, ruling out other creative programs like Adobe Premiere for video production or Adobe Audition for sound editing.

We can see the tech being handy on Adobe's excellent Photoshop Express app on mobile though, given that smartphones are already handy at the whole digital assistant thing. 

As for more powerful image editing apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign, we remain skeptical if a voice-powered assistant can replace a trained graphic designer or even an amateur with every shortcut key mapped to their muscle memory. 

Still, Adobe does have a knack for surprising us with the occasional act of technowizardry, like when it announced a new editing technology that fabricates human voices this past fall.

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