Dropbox Now Has Its Own AI, And Universal Search Is Its Thing

With almost every tech company jumping onto the AI bandwagon, how could Dropbox be left behind? It's been over a month since the company — mostly known for its file-hosting services — laid off more than 500 employees to shift its attention towards AI-focused products and features. That effort has already come to fruition with the introduction of two new AI-powered tools. The first of these products — and the one that Dropbox seems to be very bullish about — is called the Dropbox Dash. While Dropbox touts Dropbox Dash as an AI-powered universal search engine, the second feature to debut today — Dropbox AI — is a more generic AI tool designed to let consumers understand the content within their files.

Dropbox touts the AI-powered Dropbox Dash feature as a personalized AI tool that can answer queries surrounding user-generated content. Consider it a version of ChatGPT with in-depth insight into an organization or individual and their documents. With Dash, Dropbox aims to help people cut down the time they spend looking for their own content, files, and documents. The company also claims that Dropbox Dash will help them better organize all their content to put more focus on getting actual work done. 

Dropbox AI — on the other hand — will let users understand the context of the content within a file without going through the entire document. It can, for example, summarize the key points of a contract or tell users the crucial dates and deliverables involved in the said contract.

Keeping track of important files and their locations in an organization is challenging. With Dropbox Dash, this will be a thing of the past, claims Dropbox. Since it connects to widely used workplace tools like Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, and Salesforce, DropBox Dash users can use a single search bar to find anything hosted on these separate platforms without needing to search these apps individually for a specific document or file.

Aside from a standalone app, Dropbox Dash also has a browser extension that lets it summarize the contents of various browser tabs. Dropbox Dash's AI capabilities are further augmented with support for Machine Learning which means the tool learns each user's work and usage pattern and evolves accordingly.

With Dropbox AI, users will be able to ask questions surrounding their Dropbox files and summarize the content within those files. Besides saving users the trouble of reading through a long 100-page document filled with legalese, Dropbox AI can also help them better understand the content within the document with the click of a single button.

Those interested in using Dropbox Dash can join the waitlist for the beta version starting today. Dropbox AI, on the other hand, is still in its alpha phase and will first roll out to Dropbox Pro users in the U.S. soon.