Adobe Sensei

Wow. That copy is all over the place. I have to give them credit for this (unintended) piece of irony:

> Great experiences don’t just happen. And nobody knows that better than us.

I have a strong suspicion Adobe doesn't even know what this product is (why not just get to the point?). No doubt it started in a meeting where someone said "look at all of this exciting research and development around machine learning and visual media - we need to do something in that space so we don't become irrelevant", followed by an executive saying "here's $100 million; go make it happen".

I got a briefing on Adobe Sensei from some guys at the company. Basically it connects together various parts of their advertising and marketing products, in semi-automatic and automatic ways, to better track users, and to better track ad and marketing performance. Yes, it's ironic that their own marketing for this is so terrible.

I will agree there is a lot of market hype on that page, but I went to the page after reading the comments expecting to read nothing but buzz words without a clear idea of what the AI does, but I think Adobe is fairly clear on the intended use cases - automating the already existing tools across the majority of the Adobe product line, such as OCR, Automatic PDF creation, Content Aware for photoshop, and so on.

The idea is that their cloud offering is now backed by the AI to include tons of AI pony tricks, like emotional analysis of writing or digitizing physical copies of data.

Now, that being said, maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it seems like they're just throwing as much CPU behind their AI, setting it up on Adobe Cloud, and then letting it handle the tedium of the most common and time consuming tasks. But I maybe I'm wrong. The examples for each section though seem pretty straight forward - let AI do what you can already do with Adobe products, but the AI can do it automatically on upload instead of a user scrolling through a hi-res scan or taking the time to shop people or wires out of photos.

Is this an April Fools joke? I can't figure out what it's supposed to actually do.

I literally thought, "This has to be a poorly executed April Fool's joke... but, no, Adobe wouldn't attempt an April Fools joke". So, I read the comments here to see what other people are thinking. I guess I'm not alone. The video is hilariously vague. It's like some Nucleus marketing blurb where Hooli execs decided they shouldn't mention that the product does compression.

If this is a real product and not a joke, Adobe will be very unsatisfied knowing that they wasted all their money in development because their product name and description is completely intractable to understand and doesn't make any sense at all, and prospect users/buyers have no idea what to do with the information or how to acquire such product.

Adobe has another page about this that is slightly more concrete.

https://www.adobe.io/apis/cloudplatform/sensei.html

This has to be an April Fools gag, right? They can't be serious, can they? I couldn't even get past the halfway point of the page before literally choking on marketing drivel. What in holy hell does this product do?

Was hoping this was an April fool's thing.

What's with tech's obsessive use of Japanese culture? As if the ubiquitous "zen" prefix wasn't bad enough.

Interesting that I don't see a single positive comment here. There's definitely an absurd amount of marketing-speak, but this seems like a good idea to me, and a logical progression for Creative Cloud. Photoshop (and probably other CC products) has a ton of places where a little ML could make things way simpler for the user.

Although it is funny to think that Adobe is starting to become a data company in order to add features to their products.

umm.. does anyone have a buzzword-free explanation?

lol should have been called Adobe Senpai

I gave them 3 paragraphs to explain what this is. I don't know what this is.

My favorite bit of nonsensical marketing speak was the following "It re-creates elements in photos where they didn’t exist, by studying nearby pixels."

How can you RE-create something that did not exist? Also why?

Sounds kind of like the equally ambiguous IBM Watson, applied to Adobe software.

The comments on this thread reinforce the notion I have that the Adobe of today is like the IBM of the late 90s: they did so much and had been a leader for so long that they don't even know what they do anymore. And that shows in how they communicate with their audience. "Radically improve designs" "through the use of cloud"? What does that even mean?

No surprise small players are eating their lunch. They're creating stuff people actually want to use, not some grand yet empty concept out of a Salesforce pitch.

Pretty difficult to figure out what this is, but I think I've got it. Adobe Sensei is a cloud-based ML API (like IBM's Watson) that does various ML things (like image editing and content analysis). This is a UI around that API.

The reason it doesn't feel coherent is because it isn't: the Sensei API does a number of things in different domains, and this application builds a UI around all of them. There seems to be no central purpose other than "do things that we can power with ML".

The fact that they're trying to help you with marketing, and they can't even describe what they're marketing, should make you run in the other direction.

No wonder Steve Jobs hated Adobe!

(Yes, I know that was for other reasons, but this is a pretty good one.)

I'm getting the idea that Adobe has created an AI platform to help agencies with marketing efforts.

Yet reading through this landing page leaves me confused to what it actually does. Am I on the right track?

This looks like something written targeting institutional investors who don't know much about Machine Learning

What a beautiful advertisement; I have little idea of this program is about, the next Photoshop version?

I swear to God I thought this was an April Fools joke.

I thought it's April Fools