
Adobe Sensei - goblin89
http://www.adobe.com/sea/sensei.html
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dperfect
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".

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wiiittttt
It definitely has a very strong "Project Jabberwocky" vibe.

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troymc
"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don't exactly know what
they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate." —
Alice

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exolymph
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.

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csydas
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.

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

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rl3
I wasn't sure what to think either, but it appears that it isn't:

[http://fortune.com/2016/11/02/adobe-sensei-
ai/](http://fortune.com/2016/11/02/adobe-sensei-ai/)

Besides, they probably wouldn't license a Glass Animals song just for an April
Fools joke.

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elliotlarson
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.

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ygaf
I can't rule an April Fool out. A company that can't make secure software,
probably has an upside in that they are people-persons with a great sense of
humour.

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partycoder
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.

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ma2rten
Adobe has another page about this that is slightly more concrete.

[https://www.adobe.io/apis/cloudplatform/sensei.html](https://www.adobe.io/apis/cloudplatform/sensei.html)

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increment_i
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?

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kyleschiller
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.

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rootsudo
Cause Japan is exotic and cool, plus the words are trademark free.

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userbinator
Coincidentally, the Japanese like to use English to appear 'exotic and cool'
too.

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l_t
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.

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

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CMay
For Adobe which is so tightly connected to the success of the marketing
industry, it really did disappoint me at how worthless this whole page was for
explaining what the point is.

The video itself was a waste of my time. It didn't inform me what the product
was or why I should want whatever it is. Then the descriptions further down
were sort of half-baked.

Overall, it sounds like they're adding a new cloud service that leverages
machine learning to charge you for some automation features that will do some
of the work for you. The examples they provided weren't particularly exciting
or worthy of buzz, but maybe the target audience will get hyped.

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colorincorrect
lol should have been called Adobe Senpai

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Grue3
Its sole purpose would be noticing _you_ on the photos loaded into Photoshop.

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

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soyiuz
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?

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aisofteng
That's probably referring to Content Aware Fill, I would expect.

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acjohnson55
Sounds kind of like the equally ambiguous IBM Watson, applied to Adobe
software.

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goblin89
IBM Watson, Adobe Sensei, Amazon AI make vague impressions by themselves, but
they do power a bunch of practical services (most related to natural language
understanding).

Reading about Adobe Sensei made me remember the recently published paper on
Deep Photo Style Transfer, which was co-authored by people involved with Adobe
Research, and especially one comment on it[0]. Perhaps they’re indeed moving
in that direction and we’ll soon start seeing Sensei-branded elements in
Photoshop and other products!

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13965808)

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whatever_dude
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.

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bkanber
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".

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MR4D
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.)

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robert_nsu
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?

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

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singularity2001
What a beautiful advertisement; I have little idea of this program is about,
the next Photoshop version?

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

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maxsavin
I thought it's April Fools

