Adobe has now revealed that its mobile image to PDF app, Adobe Scan, will integrate with Samsung’s Bixby beginning with the Galaxy Note 9. The only caveat to the new integration is that both the Bixby Vision and Adobe Scan applications need to be installed. However, the concept seems to center around ensuring that users can do all of their machine vision image analysis from within a single application. With both apps installed, Samsung’s A.I. will automatically recognize when it is looking at a document and defer to Adobe Scan as the suggested app for dealing with the image. Adobe’s app detects the borders of the document in question, adjusts the lighting, corrects for perspective, and enhances the text before saving it as a PDF or to Adobe Document Cloud. That makes it a perfect productivity tool for saving tax forms and documents, receipts, business cards, or making digital copies of handwritten notes.
Meanwhile, the new functionality isn’t at all limited to Samsung’s newest entry in its phablet lineup either. The Korean tech giant’s Galaxy S8, Galaxy S8 Plus, Galaxy Note 8, Galaxy S9, and Galaxy S9 Plus will also gain support at an unspecified later date. Aside from PDF options, users will also be able to take advantage of Adobe’s full suite of Scan tools. So users on the supported Samsung hardware platforms will be able to accomplish tasks such as automatically saving contact information from a business card directly into their handset’s contacts application. With the above-mentioned Adobe Document Cloud integration, documents can also be managed, annotated, or signed and forms filled or modified without having to alternate back and forth between apps manually.
Adobe Scan is already a very useful application but Bixby Vision integration effectively means that Samsung’s flagship customers won’t need to remember which application to open to accomplish the desired task. Instead, they can simply utilize Bixby’s machine learning to snap photos of whatever is currently in front of them and when it’s a document, Bixby will point them in the right direction as smoothly as possible. The rest of the Adobe Scan app remains intact as well. So it will also still function as a standalone application for those who want to use it that way.