Lenovo REACHit app to add muscle to Cortana search

Lenovo and Microsoft have teamed up, in combining two strengths for one satisfying feature. The pairing up involves Cortana—the personal digital assistant across Windows 10 PCs, tablets and phones that allows users to talk or type naturally to get things done—with Lenovo's REACHit—an app that lets you connect and search multiple file storage locations in one place. The search capabilities of Cortana for Windows 10 devices have in turn been extended.

Cortana may be asked to find the item you worked on at Starbucks or find the presentation you showed your colleague last week or find some pictures on Dropbox. The key convenience is that Cortana and REACHit will enable a user's search of digital content using whatever details can be remembered—how often do you even remember the exact way you or someone else named the file?.

The search is based on what you can remember about the last time you saw or worked on an item—where you were, who sent it to you, when you last opened it, what type of file, for example. You can search for files and emails stored on a Lenovo device running Windows 10; cloud accounts such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, OneDrive; Outlook.com, Microsoft Exchange, Gmail and IMAP. You can search for files you may have looked at or created during meetings on Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, or Exchange Calendar.

Rather than having to search through folders or logging into different cloud accounts or checking out email attachments, the Cortana-REACHit service saves time. Simply, REACHit gives Cortana a larger inventory of information to search.

"We are living in a world where technology has made it easy to amass unprecedented amounts of personal digital content," said Lenovo's Mark Cohen, vice president, ecosystem and cloud services. "So much information that it can be extremely difficult to remember where it is stored." Cortana and REACHit enables people to find their content in an "incredibly natural" way, he added, by "asking a friend for help." Peter Han, vice president, Worldwide OEM Marketing, Microsoft, said that "Microsoft and Lenovo teams held creative design sessions, advanced hardware discussions, even late night coding marathons to deliver Cortana and REACHit."

What does it cost to use Cortana and REACHit? It's free, but exclusive to Lenovo users on Windows 10. Cortana and REACHit will be available as a beta when Windows 10 launches later this summer. It will be generally available for download later on this year. A sign-up form to join the Beta and use it when Windows 10 becomes available noted that "Cortana and REACHit will be available as a Beta for a limited number of US and Chinese Lenovo users when Windows 10 is available later this Summer."

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