Dropbox’s AI tools can help you find your stuff — from everywhere on the Internet

dropbox is launch Two separate but related AI-powered services in its platform. The first is simple and clear: a tool for summarizing and querying documents. It’s neat and useful, and over time you’ll see this type of feature in most tools in this category.

The other thing that Dropbox is launching is much more ambitious and interesting. It is a universal search engine that can access your files not only in Dropbox but also across the web. It’s called Dash and comes from Dropbox’s 2021 acquisition of a company called Command E. The idea behind Dash, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told me, is that your content isn’t all files and folders anymore, and so Dropbox can’t be either. “What used to be 100 files or icons on your desktop,” he says, “is now 100 tabs in your browser, with your Google Docs and your Airtables and Figmas and everything else.” All tools are better, but they oppose useful organization. “So you’re just like, OK, I think someone sent it to me. Was it in an email? Was it texting? Was it a text? Maybe pasted it into a zoom chat during a meeting?” done.” Dash aims to be the “Google for your personal stuff” app that so many others have tried and failed to pull off.

The Dash app comes in two parts. There’s a desktop app that you can invoke from anywhere with the CMD-E keyboard shortcut, which acts as a universal search for everything on your device and across all your connected apps. (If you’ve ever used an app like Raycast or Alfred as a launcher, Dash will look very familiar.) There’s also a browser extension, which offers similar search, but pops up your new tab page with a curated list of your stuff. transforms. Part of the Dash start page may include the docs Dropbox thinks you’ll need to start a meeting in five minutes; You can drag together a group of similar documents you’ve been working on recently in what Dropbox calls a “Stack.” You can even create your own stack, and as you create files and even browse the Internet, Dash will suggest files and links that you can add.

By the way, the word “heap” is important. Dropbox has been a file-in-folder company since it was founded in 2007, and it’s making a conscious break with that paradigm as it leans into all things AI. “There’s no real container that can hold Google Docs and Excel spreadsheets and 10-gig 4K videos,” Houston says, “and older organizational systems break down even further as the platform begins to learn that all three of these things are almost Your home renovation project, and here are some other documents about that project!

Can you call that all… a folder? Sure! But the way Dropbox sees it, the concept of folders has so much history that it’s getting in the way. “People are looking for more sort of flexibility,” says Devin Mancuso, director of product design at Dropbox, “or they’re thinking about grouping and organizing apps in slightly different ways when it comes to tabs and apps.” Are. You can have a file in multiple stacks to name one example, which doesn’t work in the world of folders. Both Houston and Mancuso compare Stacks to Spotify playlists instead, in that they’re personally curated and algorithmically enhanced mixes. Losing the F-word is both a practical design and a philosophical one.

When Houston gave me a demo of Dash working on my account, its new-tab page pulled up a bunch of information about me and my ledge (likely tied to a calendar event we were both involved in) and created an automated stack of plan-related documents that he and his executives had in the middle of that week. “It’s such a basic concept, isn’t it?” he says, poking around in his browser. “Search that actually works, an archive concept for links and files and cloud content of any kind, bringing machine intelligence into the experience – it’s more than a self-organizing Dropbox. Not everyone needs their own librarian.” Must be, taking things away.

Of course, this is not a new or unique idea. The idea of ​​cross-platform, universal search for your personal data and documents has been around practically as long as the Internet itself. Bigger language models can certainly make that search more powerful, which is why companies like Mem and Rewind and even Google are investing heavily in it.

Houston readily admits that Dropbox isn’t the first company to come up with the idea, but he thinks that Dropbox has one big advantage over most of its competitors in this space: It already has a lot of users and companies that want to spend all of their time with it. Uploading important and most sensitive material. for the platform. Integrating with the Figmas and Airtables of the world is in some ways a much easier problem than accessing your existing file system. “It’s a very natural extension,” Houston says, “to be like, ‘We started with your files, but now we support everything. Maybe we should be supporting everything a long time ago. Was.”

The big question for Dropbox and everyone who works on it is security. Here too, Houston seems to have the leg up on Dropbox. “Nobody wants their content to be chopped up into little pieces and put into some kind of advertising machine,” he says. “So the fact that Dropbox is a fundamentally private service, the fact that we’re subscribing, the fact that our incentives are aligned, it all helps.” Especially with all your data in the cloud, there are still a lot of questions about how the data is accessed, who can see what, how personalized the different systems should be, and more.

As of today, Dropbox AI is available to all Pro customers and some Teams, and there is a waiting list to enter the Dash beta as well. The next step for Dropbox, Houston says, is to learn what people want and how they use the products. He says he’s happy to be somewhat conservative in the name of not making big mistakes in the first place — you really can’t have AI hallucinations from your most sensitive work docs — but he sees this stuff growing exponentially. keeps getting better.

In general, Dropbox has been thinking about AI integration for a long time. It’s one of that class of what you might call co-working companies, along with Asana, Slack, and others; They aren’t the tools you use to get work done—they’re the tools that keep your files in order and your team and your life together in sync. For all of these companies, the first step was making everything easier to manage. But there’s always a step two inherent in this: teach things to manage themselves. “In the physical world,” Houston says, “the equivalent is to imagine that you have all these papers on your desk, and they’re sorting themselves neatly into piles. Perfect. That’s what we’re making.”