Find answers to common questions about accessing, using, and managing Knowledge Base in Acrobat.
This FAQ answers common questions about Knowledge Base in Acrobat, including how the service works, who can use it, how content is managed, and where to find help. Use it as a starting point for understanding the service before moving to more detailed user, administrator, or developer documentation.
General Questions
Knowledge Base is a powerful enterprise-grade Gen AI solution that enables organizations to quickly access and leverage actionable intelligence from PDF-based knowledge collections, supercharge critical document workflows, and accelerate deployment of sophisticated Gen AI solutions.
Knowledge Base supports a broad range of commonly used document and web formats, allowing teams to work with existing content without conversion or restructuring.
Supported content includes:
- Adobe PDF documents.
- Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
- Common text-based formats such as TXT and CSV.
- Email and web-based content, including public websites.
- Documents synced from supported storage integrations.
This flexibility allows collections to reflect how teams already store and work with information, while keeping content accessible for search, analysis, and AI-powered interactions.
Knowledge Base automatically converts MS Office documents into PDFs before processing. This standardization ensures uniform indexing, retrieval, and AI-driven insights.
Text file types are ingested as-is without converting to PDF.
AI and Performance Questions
Knowledge Base provides advanced AI-powered document insights, including:
- Q&A – Ask questions about document content.
- Summarization – Generate key takeaways from long documents.
- Full-text search – Retrieve relevant document snippets quickly.
- Entity identification and extraction – Automatically recognize and extract key information (API-only).
- Granular attribution – Provides citations for PDF sources within collections.
- Advanced reasoning – Supports complex workflows.
- Web links – Supports internet websites or direct URLs as sources within collections. Collections can contain both documents and web links.
- Direct model or internet as sources – Supports using the internet or the LLM itself as a source for answers when content outside of curated collections is needed.
- Model selection – Supports three state-of-the-art OpenAI LLMs: General, Fast Reasoning, and Advanced.
- Format, style, and tone – Supports control of AI output for questions.
Knowledge Base is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and leverages Azure OpenAI for AI processing. AWS is used for core application hosting, data storage, and compute resources, whereas Azure OpenAI provides the large language model capabilities. This ensures scalability, security, and compliance while utilizing enterprise-grade Gen AI models for advanced document intelligence.
Not yet. The current version of Knowledge Base supports US English only, but multilingual support is planned before commercial release.
The AI Assistant does not directly expose Knowledge Base's Extract Prompt Builder capabilities, but they are available via the API. Users can test document Extract JSON via the "JSON" tab in the AI Assistant on selected documents before using it via the Extract API.
Document and Web Content Handling
Currently, Knowledge Base only processes text-based content. Future updates may include support for images, charts, and visual elements.
Knowledge Base supports web indexing and content ingestion via a Web Indexer desktop application, which can index and ingest authenticated Intranet and Internet websites. When using the Web Indexer, page content is indexed directly into a Knowledge Base Collection.
No, Knowledge Base Web Links don't crawl entire websites. Instead, it retrieves preindexed content from Bing. If you specify a link such as xyz.com, Knowledge Base will fetch the latest indexed content dynamically rather than storing a full copy.
Functionality and Usage
While Knowledge Base is a powerful AI-driven solution, here are some current limitations:
- Data must be ingested into Knowledge Base rather than connecting to live enterprise data sources in real time.
- Multi-collection queries require specific configurations. Send an email to knowledgebase-support@adobe.com with specific configuration asks.
- Limited native integrations (currently Slack, API, and manual SharePoint ingestion).
- External access requires explicit provisioning and public-facing domain enablement.
Refer to the Service Limitations page for a more expansive list.
Yes. Knowledge Base allows users to query multiple collections, which can be done via:
- Web UI – Selecting multiple collections within the interface.
- API Queries – Configuring API calls to retrieve results from multiple collections.
- Advanced Search Filters – Users can specify which collections to pull insights from.
This feature enables users to aggregate insights from different document sets for more comprehensive analysis.
- Documents per collection: Recommended under 10K documents in the Prerelease version.
- Document size limit: 400 pages per document and 150MB.
- File upload limit: 200 files per upload.
- Number of collections: Recommended under 1000 collections in the Prerelease version.
- Tokens per chat conversation: 10,000 characters per input.
- Chat continuity: Knowledge Base maintains context over several turns for fluid conversation capabilities.
Chat history is maintained, and new Chat conversations can be created, or Chats can be deleted if desired.
Refer to the Service Limitations page for a more expansive list.
Integrations and Access
Users can interact with Knowledge Base through the following interfaces:
- Web UI – A full-featured experience for managing documents, searching content, and working with AI-powered insights.
- Slack chatbot integration – Ask questions and query documents directly from Slack by launching the Knowledge Base app within Slack channels.
- API – Build custom integrations and automate AI-powered workflows using programmatic access to Knowledge Base capabilities.
Slack and Microsoft Teams are the only direct chat integrations. However, Knowledge Base supports data ingestion through the following methods:
- Web crawling for site-based document sources.
- Manual SharePoint file selection.
- Static EML email file ingestion.
Knowledge Base requires document ingestion and does not currently support live connections to external data sources.
JSON is not currently a supported ingestion format, but we are exploring adding this capability.
Knowledge Base typically requires document ingestion, including PDFs, Office files, and HTML.
However, we are exploring support for JSON ingestion via API. If your knowledge base is available through an API that provides structured JSON, we can potentially map and ingest it. Our engineering team would need a sample JSON schema to evaluate feasibility.
Currently, Knowledge Base collections do not auto-sync with external APIs.
Embedding and User Experience
Yes. A single Knowledge Base deployment can be accessed via Web UI, API, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. Once data is ingested into a collection, permissions can be managed across different access points without requiring separate deployments.
Analytics and Observability
Yes. The prereleaseversion includes basic analytics that show:
- How often are specific documents referenced in AI responses
- Which collections receive the most queries
- Exportable reports (CSV format) for further analysis
Future iterations will include more advanced dashboards for deeper insights.
Admin and Customer Management
- Admins can create and manage collections
- Granular access controls allow different levels of user permissions
- Internal monitoring, alerts, and onboarding tools for solution consultants
Yes, but external customers must be explicitly provisioned. Knowledge Base supports:
- Public-facing domains for external users
- Onboarding and provisioning of external customers
- Customer-facing collection usage metrics
Yes! You can share collections you create with individual users in your organization, or you can share collections you create with your entire organization if desired. You can also designate other individual users as collection managers with the ability to edit collection contents if you desire.
Getting Started and Support
Users can create a document collection, upload files, and deploy an AI assistant or chatbot in minutes via the Knowledge Base web interface.
Contact your Adobe representative (knowledgebase-support@adobe.com) or refer to the Helpx documentation for setup instructions.
