Both Dropbox Dash and Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant help summarize and organize my documents. The AI features in both are super helpful, but which is best?

What Are Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant and Dropbox Dash?

Adobe Acrobat’s AI Assistant is a generative AI tool that can be purchased as an add-on to any Adobe Acrobat package. It works by identifying information within your scanned, uploaded, or filled out and fillable PDF documents, so you can use AI Assistant to ask questions, summarize, or cite information in seconds.

Dropbox Dash is a similar tool provided by Dropbox, a cloud file management tool. While you can upload photos and videos to Dropbox, Dropbox Dash—its AI-powered universal search tool—works on scanned or uploaded written documents, as well as documents within connected apps, by identifying terms for search, summarizing, or providing answers to your questions.

While both product extras create similar features in two pretty different tools, there must be one that works better than the other for AI document management features.

Platforms and Cost

You can access Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant via the desktop version of Adobe Acrobat, its browser version, and the mobile version (which is in beta at the time of writing).

You must purchase Acrobat AI Assistant as a separate add-on feature to your Acrobat package. Any plan type can use Acrobat AI Assistant, even the free plans—but you must purchase the AI Assistant to use it. It costs $4.99 per month, regardless of the plan you have. This means that even Adobe Acrobat Pro users—who are paying subscribers—still need to purchase the AI Assistant add-on separately.

Dropbox Dash is available as its own app, and it’s also available through the browser and mobile versions, which are available only in the US. You can access Dropbox Dash on both Windows and Mac machines, Apple and Android mobile devices, and all major browsers.

You can use the Dash app similar to a search engine, but the information is all from your own connected or uploaded documents rather than the abyss of the internet. Dash currently only works for files in English in the US region and not in any other languages.

Conversely, with Dash, although Dropbox Dash itself is free, it can only be used with a premium Dropbox account. This is the opposite of Acrobat’s AI Assistant, a paid add-on that can be used with both paid or free versions of Acrobat.

Using both Acrobat AI Assistant or Dropbox Dash to summarize documents is one of the most helpful ways to use either tool. Although other AI tools like Otter exist for summarizing audio documents into written summaries—a great AI tool for content writers—AI Assistant and Dash both do a great job of summarizing large walls of text quickly.

Upon opening a document with Acrobat AI Assistant, you’ll instantly be presented with a basic overview summary. You don’t have to do anything to see the overview, which instantly offers you a quick view of the document—and you can upload documents as large as 600 pages and up to 10 documents at once.

Dropbox Dash can summarize a myriad of documents quickly. Not only your uploaded documents and files, but it can also summarize work meetings, emails, Notion boards, and many other text and text-in-image-based documents. It summarizes much more than Acrobat can offer, but it has a heavier system of use in comparison. You can find summaries by asking questions about documents, files, or connected accounts.

Acrobat AI Assistant offers different search tools, including typing questions or using the voice search function. The app’s overview generates generic but relevant questions you can use as a starting point if you don’t yet have any questions. There’s also a text box where you can write your own questions.

Dropbox Dash has a universal search function that can scan and search not only your documents but also files and apps you connect to your account. It can work as a search engine within your personal documents, files, and accounts, allowing you to save time searching for answers by asking Dash instead.

You can search using keywords, titles, and security protection to keep non-authorized team members from important documents. Within the search function, you can ask Dash direct questions, and it returns human-sounding answers based on available documents.

Voice Search

Using Acrobat AI Assistant from your smartphone, you can use your voice to search through your documents. Acrobat AI Assistant for phones is in beta at the time of writing, so it doesn’t work with 100% effectiveness right now, but with Adobe’s history, I have high expectations of good results once the feature becomes entirely public.

After using the speech-to-search function, you can play the answer out loud to listen to rather than keeping it read-only.

Citation

When using Acrobat AI Assistant to scan through your documents, summarize, or answer questions you’ve asked the AI about your documents, the results will always appear with a linked citation. Doing so ensures you can prove where the Acrobat AI Assistant found the information it has presented to you.

As a result of the citation, it also proves to you that all information supplied comes directly from the information you feed Adobe Acrobat. It doesn’t source incorrect or inaccurate information from other sources, and you can always directly trace back to exactly where it summarized information from to give you peace of mind.

Dropbox Dash also cites its sources, but its citations aren’t as obvious or easily traceable as Acrobat’s. Since Dash has access to more content and data, due to the integrated apps you can connect, there’s more of a chance of misinformation being provided in your answers, so clear citations should be more important than they are.

Acrobat AI Assistant vs. Dropbox Dash: External App Connectivity

Acrobat AI Assistant doesn’t connect with other apps outside the Adobe suite of tools. Although that sounds limiting, since it works within Adobe Acrobat, it has a whole host of built-in features, so you’re not missing much by not connecting to external apps.

Adobe Acrobat AI can connect directly to Adobe Express, one of the best Adobe apps in the modern day. Through this connection—although slightly different from the Acrobat AI Assistant tool itself—you can integrate AI-generated images and add designed layouts to your documents. Pretty cool.

Dropbox Dash’s interface has a dashboard allowing you to connect any and almost all productivity and management software tools to Dash. Doing so allows you to use Dash’s AI search functions across the board in other apps, including e-mails, chat threads, and calendars, to name some options.

While these two tools offer similar features, they’re also different enough that it might be difficult to compare them too strictly against one another. As a non-US dweller, Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant is my best choice since it’s not region-blocked to the US. I already use a large Adobe workflow in my day-to-day life, so purchasing the AI Assistant add-on won’t mean I have to learn a new interface, and it’s very simple to use the tool too.

I have gained a lot of trust from Acrobat’s use of citations; they’re obvious and transparent, which I don’t find with Dropbox Dash’s vague citations. I much prefer the lack of external app connectivity from Acrobat, as Dash’s seems too overboard for my personal tastes. I don’t want AI involved in every step of my life, and I found it annoying to have Dash start up every time I opened my laptop rather than being able to access it only when I wanted or needed to.