In Beijing, Lenovo has announced REACHit, a new content indexing product that will connect exclusively to Cortana to help users find their content using natural language such as “what is the file I updated last week at Startbucks?”.
It has happened to nearly everyone: we quickly edit a file, take a photo, save a movie, download a file – and we can’t remember its name of where it was saved. And it’s fair to say that without knowing the file’s name, things can get frustrating quickly.
Lenovo’s REACHit uses a contextual approach to the problem. First, it creates an index of all your content, and this can span a huge array of locations, including multiple computers and online storage services such as Dropbox, One Drive and more. It is up to the user to decide what the application can… reach.
But the Lenovo’s software will also try to retrieve your calendar information, and your location if you let it. By combing all this information in the context of the previous question, it can see that you have accessed a small number of files, while being at Starbucks, thus largely reducing the potential results.
The same can be true for questions such as “PowerPoint file modified with Robert on Monday”: REACHit can check on your calendar when you met Robert, and look at which PowerPoint files were accessed around that timeframe. You get the point: the software can go well beyond the file name and modified date, if there is enough information available.
REACHit can find files in many locations, so if you own many computers, and many online storage accounts, it can find content in all those places, from any computer you are currently using.
The integration with Cortana is very tight. From a user point of view, Cortana (Windows voice interface) is the only interface. Cortana is not launching REACHit – instead they are both communicating in the background to provide your answer. This pushes the boundaries of content search far beyond the traditional Windows search, which is limited to the current computer you are working on.
At the moment, Lenovo plans to use REACHit as a differentiator for its computers, so this will only work with Lenovo computers. As time goes on, Lenovo may re-evaluate this stance, since technically, nothing would prevent using REACHit on 3rd-party systems.
Of course, REACHit will work optimally if it can access more of your data, and depending on your privacy boundaries, it may have more or less to work with. Note that the index files and much of this information will also end up being hosted on Lenovo’s cloud.
The concept is really interesting, and we will have to see how well it works in practice. However, this is the kind of software innovation that is unusual –and welcome- from a computer maker.