Adobe has released a concept video showing how voice-based photo editing might work on an iPad. The video shows a user selecting voice control, cropping a photo to a square, flipping the image horizontally and posting to Facebook.

While Adobe’s description is vague, it doesn’t seem that it has actually created the app, the description merely stating that the company’s research team ‘is exploring what an intelligent digital assistant photo editing might look like.’

I’d agree with TNW that it’s hard to see much benefit to what has been demo’d as the same task would seem to be just as easy using standard editing tools, but it’s an interesting look at a possible future for those who want very basic photo editing without having to learn to use an app.

To envision this, we combined the emerging science of voice interaction with a deep understanding of both creative workflows and the creative aspirations of our customers. Our speech recognition system is able to directly accept natural user voice instructions for image editing either locally through on-device computing or through a cloud-based Natural Language understanding service.  This is a first step towards a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way using Adobe mobile applications.

Can you see yourself using an app in this way? Check out the video below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Adobe last month made available a new version of Photoshop for Mac that supports the Touch Bar.