Microsoft and Lenovo announce Cortana and REACHit integration for Windows 10
At the Lenovo Tech World today, Microsoft and Lenovo jointly announced collaboration to help users find content in more personal way with Cortana and REACHit. Cortana is popular voice assistance (in line with Google Now and Apple Siri) while Lenovo’s REACHit adds extra functionality to search capability of Cortana and this will be available for Windows 10 devices and cloud services. With REACHit integration, Cortana will be able to search for data on personal cloud accounts and on services that are not owned by Microsoft (Google Drive, Dropbox etc). The new integrated solution will be available as beta once Windows 10 launches this summer. Head to this site for more information.
A Lenovo ID is assigned to the user and once logged in, Cortana+REACHit can access metadata for variety of content to retrieve the right data, to provide the right information to the users. This drastically improves contextual search capabilities of Cortana.
Take a look at this example provided by Lenovo and this is one scenario where someone like me will need (as I tend to forget the file name of the document or photo that was edited a while ago):
For example, a user wants to find a photo that she edited on her Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop last week. Now she can access it while she’s away from her laptop at the coffee shop by using her Lenovo ThinkPad 10 tablet. She no longer needs to go home and work on the laptop. And by using Cortana and REACHit, she doesn’t even have to remember the name of the photo file – just the location where she edited it, or the date or another piece of relevant information. For example, she could search by saying: “Cortana, find the picture I edited last week on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon.” Or “Cortana, find the picture I worked on at Starbucks last week.”
“We are living in a world where technology has made it easy to amass unprecedented amounts of personal digital content,” said Mark Cohen, Vice President, Ecosystem and Cloud Services, Lenovo. “So much information that it can be extremely difficult to remember where it is stored. What you need is an assistant – a friend – who is always at the ready to help. That is where Cortana and REACHit comes in, enabling people to find their personal content in an incredibly natural way – by asking a friend for help.”
“It’s great to see Lenovo building on the Windows and Cortana platform to create a unique and valuable solution that will help our joint customers be more productive across their devices and services,” said Peter Han, vice president, Worldwide OEM Marketing, Microsoft Corp. “Microsoft and Lenovo teams held creative design sessions, advanced hardware discussions, even late night coding marathons to deliver Cortana and REACHit.”
Key Features
- Allows users to search for photos, videos, documents and music across devices, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive, PCs and tablets
- Gives users the ability to add location to searches, cross-referencing the file event with the location data to produce the most relevant results
- Cortana and REACHit works on Lenovo PCs and tablets running Windows 10.
- Since Lenovo and Microsoft collaborated on this project, this results in a seamless, enhanced Cortana search experience
- A single place to search for your content, whatever it is and wherever it may be
- Support for cloud storage providers like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box
- Support for email services like Gmail, Exchange, and IMAP
- Support for calendar services* like Exchange, Outlook.com, and Google Calendar
- Support for search across multiple Windows 10 devices
- The most natural search – express your search as you would normally speak it, based on what you can remember
- Contextual awareness enables you to search in ways you never thought possible
