What Nitro's AI can do with your PDFs: from summaries to translation

Nitro offers a range of PDF editors to cope with the needs of all kinds of users—from individuals to enterprises—but all these plans make good use of AI capabilities. That includes the Nitro Assistant, and the optional paid add-on Nitro Automate. This article will examine the AI features therein which can help you work with PDFs in new and easier ways that can save time, from quickly summarising key data in these documents through to intelligent redaction functionality.

TL;DR

• Nitro's AI features include Nitro Assistant, a context-aware AI which can summarise PDFs or answer questions about their content, extract data from forms or tables, and facilitate translations with 80+ languages supported
• Nitro Assistant is available with the Nitro PDF Standard or Nitro PDF Plus plans, and it operates in a fully secure environment so you can be sure any data shared with the AI stays private and is never used for training (unlike with public AI services)
• Nitro's other AI paid products include Nitro Smart Redact, which automatically redacts 30+ categories of personally identifiable information, and Nitro Automate, a platform for businesses that connects Nitro's PDF and data extraction capabilities to AI agents or other tools

Nitro's AI can swiftly summarise documents or answer questions

Nitro Assistant is invaluable for dealing with lengthy PDFs as the AI is capable of providing a full summary of the contents and succinctly answering any question you may have about the document.

This Document Assistant is available with a Nitro PDF Standard or Nitro PDF Plus subscription plan, and it can prove to be a lifesaver when you have a hefty PDF land on your desktop. The kind of document that fills you with dread when you open it to discover a hundred pages of content (or more).

For example, you might be a student facing a lengthy research paper, feeling lost as to where to even start to tackle a PDF like this. Instead of trying to get your head around all those pages yourself, you can ask Nitro Assistant to summarise the document. The AI will speedily compile a neat summary highlighting all the key aspects, allowing you to grasp the main points and focus on the most relevant sections of the document.

You can also ask Nitro Assistant specific questions about any of the contents of the PDF in a natural conversational style, making it easier to gain further insights into the document, or find any supporting information you need without resorting to a clunky search through a ton of terms in a long document. If there's anything you don't understand in the research paper, Nitro's AI can be called on to provide an easily digestible explanation, or to elaborate on areas where you feel the paper is perhaps sketchy.

Nitro Assistant boasts the following capabilities:

• Deep document analysis
• Multi-step reasoning
• Fully context-aware
• The ability to remember previous questions and the thread of the ongoing conversation

All of this makes for a more natural conversational exchange, and a feeling of getting advice and insights from a colleague, albeit a virtual one.

Nitro says that Nitro Assistant is "designed to reduce time spent on document review by up to 90%", which is a lot of time potentially saved.

Need to translate a PDF? Nitro's AI makes it easy

If you have a PDF in a foreign language and need it translated, Nitro Assistant can take care of that within your Nitro PDF editor.

This means there's no need to use an extra app, or an online service, to translate the text, having to manually copy it all across, and then recopy the resulting translation to your document. Nitro's AI will do all this for you without leaving the document in the PDF editor.

Say you have a PDF instruction manual in a different language, and can't get hold of a copy in your native tongue—you can have it translated by Nitro Assistant in a jiffy. The translation happens instantly, and the AI supports over 80 languages, so it's a broad range of coverage.

Worried about privacy with AI services? Don't be with Nitro's AI

Whereas public AI services may use the data you input for their own purposes or pass it on to third parties, Nitro Assistant operates in a secure environment where your private data stays private.

If you're talking to an AI and sharing a sensitive document—like, say, a medical or financial report—you need to know that the AI service is fully secure, and that the data involved aren't at any risk of being hoovered up by some third party and potentially compromised in some way.

When you use a public AI service, there's no way of knowing what's really going on behind the scenes—the old adage of 'if a product is free, you're the product' (meaning your data is) may well apply.

However, Nitro Assistant within Nitro's PDF editor runs in a fully secure environment. Whatever data you share with Nitro's AI won't be leveraged in any other way besides examining it to extract whatever you need, and the processing ends there, with your results.

Nitro Smart Redact takes the pain out of document redaction

PDF power users or small teams who work with documents that need to be redacted to keep sensitive details safe will benefit greatly from Nitro's Smart Redact tool.

Smart Redact is built around an AI that uses natural language processing (NLP) to detect more than 30 categories of 'personally identifiable information'—details that could be used to identify a specific individual—and redacts these from documents (including scans or image files).

Because it uses NLP, Nitro's AI is capable of picking up redactions in unstructured data that basic pattern-based searches can often miss, meaning you get a more accurately redacted document (which is vital given the consequences of missing something).

Smart Redact performs its redaction duties and then presents them with full transparency for the user to review, so you can adjust or revoke any redactions that require attention. It's a powerful AI-based system with proven security and compliance. Smart Redact can help small teams through to large enterprises, and is a paid add-on that can be added to Nitro’s subscription plans.

Nitro Automate: a serious business

More broadly for businesses, Nitro Automate, is a paid add-on platform that connects Nitro's PDF and data extraction functionality to AI agents or tools like Power Automate.

Nitro Automate can facilitate processing thousands of documents in seconds rather than hours, whether that's automating the multi-party signing of a host of documents using eSign, or enabling the extraction of tables, or fields from forms, on a large scale.

For example, an insurance firm could use Nitro Automate to convert a batch of claim files to standardised PDFs, extract the required data to send to the adjuster, and automatically trigger an eSignature request as soon as a file is ready.

What kind of real-world impact does this have on productivity?

Forrester's 'Total Economic Impact of the Nitro Productivity Platform' report estimates that the hours that can be saved on processing PDFs in a business amounts to a staggering 84,375 hours over three years.

Another illuminating report, Nitro's 'State of AI in Document Workflows', observes that: "Executives and managers tell the same story. The time lost to manual document work is real, and it's more than most organizations have accounted for."

Nitro found that 62% of staff members lose six or more hours every week to completing manual document tasks, with only 12% of teams having AI fully embedded into their document workflows. Nitro's report notes that 37% still rely on standalone AI tools alongside document software, so for example, they're pasting into ChatGPT for their AI needs, with all the privacy issues (and productivity slowdown) that this entails.

Nitro's AI features at a glance

Here's a handy summary of the key AI features that Nitro provides, and what plans they are available with:

FAQs

What should you ask an AI assistant when reviewing a complex PDF?

Nitro Assistant is a powerful AI feature that can be a massive help when trying to digest a lengthy PDF. The AI works using natural language, so you can phrase your queries just as if you were talking to a real person. You should ask Nitro Assistant for a broad overview of the document summarising the key points, and then further home in to focus on the areas you're more interested in, getting the AI to extract any specific information that you need.

Can AI translate PDF content while preserving its context and meaning?

AI is indeed capable of translating text in a foreign language while keeping its original meaning. Nitro Assistant is a powerful AI tool that translates text directly within the PDF editor, offering accurate translations which happen instantly, and providing support for over 80 languages.

How much time can Nitro Assistant save when reviewing long PDFs?

Going by Forrester's 'Total Economic Impact of the Nitro Productivity Platform' report, a user saves 15 minutes on average for every PDF document processed with Nitro – and reviewing lengthy PDFs will likely come a lot higher. Trawling through a hefty PDF and trying to fathom out the details or take your own notes is a serious time sink of a process, and having AI do this legwork will inevitably save you a lot of effort.