Latest news with #ZekeKoch
Engadget
7 days ago
- Engadget
Adobe Firefly can now generate sound effects from your audio cues
Since rolling out the redesign of its Firefly app in April, Adobe has been releasing major updates for the generative AI hub at a near monthly clip. Today, the company is introducing a handful of new features to assist those who use Firefly's video capabilities. To start, Adobe is making it easier to add sound effects to AI-generated clips. Right now, the majority of video models create footage without any accompanying audio. Adobe is addressing this with a nifty little feature that allows users to first describe the sound effect they want to generate and then record themselves making it. The second part isn't so Adobe's model can mimic the sound. Rather, it's so the system can get a better idea of the intensity and timing the user wants from the effect. In the demo Adobe showed me, one of the company's employees used the feature to add the sound of a zipper being unzipped. They made a "zzzztttt" sound, which Adobe's model faithfully used to reproduce the effect at the intended volume. The translation was less convincing when the employee used the tool to add the sound of footsteps on concrete, though if you're using the feature for ideation as Adobe intended, that may not matter. When adding sound effects, there's a timeline editor along the bottom of the interface to make it easy to time the audio properly. The other new features Adobe is adding today are called Composition Reference, Keyframe Cropping and Video Presets. The first of those allows you to upload a video or image you captured to guide the generation process. In combination with Video Presets, you can define the style of the final output. Some of the options Adobe is offering at launch allow you to create clips with anime, black and white or vector art styles. Lastly, with Keyframe Cropping you can upload the first and final frame of a video and select an aspect ratio. Firefly will then generate a video that stays within your desired format. In June, Adobe added support for additional third-party models , and this month it's doing the same. Most notable is the inclusion of Veo 3 , which Google premiered at its I/O 2025 conference in May. At the moment, Veo 3 is one of the only AI models that can generate video with sound. Like with all the other partner models Adobe offers in Firefly, Google has agreed not to use data from Adobe users for training future models. Every image and video people create through Firefly is digitally signed with the model that was used to create it. That is one of the safeguards Adobe includes so that Firefly customers don't accidentally ship an asset that infringes on copyrighted material. According to Zeke Koch, vice president of product management for Adobe Firefly, users can expect the fast pace of updates to continue. "We're relentlessly shipping stuff almost as quickly as we can," he said. Koch adds Adobe will continue to integrate more third-party models, as long as their providers agree to the company's data privacy terms.
Engadget
17-06-2025
- Business
- Engadget
Adobe's Firefly generative AI app is now available on mobile
When its redesigned Firefly app arrived earlier this year, Adobe launched the platform without Android and iOS app support, saying those would come at a later date. Today, the company is making good on that promise, with both versions available to download from their respective storefronts. If you're new to Firefly, it's the place where Adobe brings together all of its AI image, video, audio and vector generation tools. The company relaunched the app in April at its Max conference in London. Since then, it has been working on enhancing the functionality that's already there, starting with a feature it calls Firefly Boards. The tool is, like the name suggests, a way to make digital mood boards. It was available in private beta when Adobe relaunched Firefly. Now, the company is rolling it out to everyone with a few new features in tow, including the ability to easily arrange uploads and generate video from sample assets. With today's release, Boards also offer continuity through Adobe Creative Cloud, meaning if you download an image and make a change to it in Photoshop, it will be reflected in the board. When the new Firefly first arrived, it launched with support for Adobe's own image models, as well as several partner systems such as Imagen 3, Veo 2 and ChatGPT image generation. Today, Adobe is also expanding the number of third-party models to include Runway, Luma, Pika and Ideogram. Both new and old model providers have agreed to not use data from Adobe users for training purposes. According to Zeke Koch, the vice president of product management for Adobe Firefly, most people use the company's Firefly Image 4 for the majority of their generative AI needs in the app, with its top of the line model, Image 4 Ultra, accounting for less than 10 percent of usage. "Partner models are another step down from that," he says, suggesting they get little usage. So why then offer generative systems? "Our belief is that people are choosing other models when there's a capability that those models have, that our models don't have, and that they need, and they're using them in an ideation rather than production context," says Koch. For example, OpenAI offers instruction-based editing through its image generator, which makes it easy to tweak a picture without generating it again from scratch. Other models, like Ideogram, are better at generating text, and each system offers a slightly different "artistic" style people may prefer for specific tasks. Moving forward, Koch says Adobe hopes to support as many models as possible, as long as the companies behind them agree to Adobe's terms. "There are a few models that we've chosen not to engage with because we're worried about data protection issues or things we have to sign to," he adds. You can download the Adobe Firefly app from the App Store and Google Play.
