This article was published on January 12, 2017

Adobe wants you to use voice commands to edit photos


Adobe just released a concept video depicting an iPad user making simple edits to his photos by issuing voice commands. Hit the play button above to check it out.

The tech shown in the clip isn’t particularly exciting, as it seems like you could probably achieve the same result much faster using the touchscreen.

Plus, the voice-based system would either have to be sophisticated enough to understand a wide range of commands and synonymous ones, or you’d have to learn the exact terms to use for each function. It’s simpler to just pick tools and settings by looking at buttons that have icons showing what they do.

Adobe noted that this is merely “a first step towards a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way” on mobile – but it hasn’t confirmed whether it actually plans to build this out in 2017.

Perhaps this would work for the most basic editing tasks, but beyond that, it doesn’t seem very useful for any sort of fine-grained control over your images. I can’t imagine adjusting tones and levels, applying effects like grain and cropping out unwanted elements accurately without getting my hands dirty.

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Would you care to use voice commands for photo editing if Adobe enabled such a feature? Let us know in the comments.

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