Adobe Inc. today made three of its most popular applications available in ChatGPT at no charge.

Two of the programs, Photoshop and Adobe Express, focus on graphic design tasks. Embedding them in ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million weekly users, could give Adobe a valuable distribution boost amid competition from rivals such as newly public Figma Inc. The third Adobe application that became available in ChatGPT today is the Acrobat PDF editor.

OpenAI Group PBC started allowing third-party developers to embed their software in ChatGPT two months ago. An open-source development toolkit, the Apps SDK, provides the building blocks necessary to create embedded applications. Additionally, ChatGPT includes a so-called Developer Mode that enables software teams to test their Apps SDK projects before broadly releasing them. 

ChatGPT users can interact with Adobe software by entering the name of the application they wish to access and the task it should perform. For example, a designer could enter the command “Photoshop, change the background of my image.” Users can enter multiple follow-up prompts after an initial edit to make refinements.

Adobe Express, the second design application that Adobe has embedded in ChatGPT, offers a more limited feature set than Photoshop. It’s mainly geared towards creating promotional materials such as ad visuals and brochures. The application includes a large library of creative assets ChatGPT can draw on during design projects.

Like Photoshop and Adobe Express, the version of Acrobat that is embedded in ChatGPT takes natural language text as input. Users can instruct it to turn Word documents into PDFs, merge them into a single file and redact sensitive business data. If a PDF contains a table, Acrobat can export it as a standalone Excel file.

Should the integration prove popular, Adobe may bring additional applications to ChatGPT. One potential candidate is Illustrator. It’s a design tool that focuses on many of the same use cases as Adobe Express, but offers a significantly broader feature set. 

Acrobat, Photoshop and Adobe Express are available to ChatGPT users globally. The former two applications are accessible in all the versions of OpenAI’s chatbot except the Android client, which will be added to the list soon. Adobe Express already supports the Android client.

Adobe’s artificial intelligence efforts extend beyond ChatGPT. Photoshop and Adobe Express both include a built-in chatbot that enables users to make edits with natural language prompts. Additionally, the company provides a family of media generation models called Firefly that enterprise customers can fine-tune using their internal datasets.

Image: Adobe