Dropbox Transforms into AI-Powered Assistant
Today, Dropbox revealed its latest offerings that unsurprisingly center around AI. The first, Dropbox AI, examines your documents and offers summaries and responses. The second, Dropbox Dash, is a more ambitious tool that acts as a comprehensive search bar for all aspects of your life.
Dropbox AI is the simpler of the two new offerings. It uses AI for file previews and provides summaries and natural language Q&A of your documents. “With one click, you can condense your content, such as contracts and meeting recordings, into a concise explanation,” the company explained. Or ask Dropbox AI questions about the contents of a specific file and it can answer. “With Dropbox AI, you can now pull up a file, ask it anything, and Dropbox will read the document for you and give you an answer,” CEO Drew Houston said in a promotional video.
Meanwhile, Dropbox Dash has a much wider reach, essentially acting as an augmented and AI-powered version of Apple Spotlight search, Windows Search, or third-party launchers like Alfred. Dropbox wants Dash to be everything you need—locally or online. “Dropbox Dash is an AI-powered universal search that brings together all your tools, content, and apps in one search bar,” the company wrote. “With connectors to major platforms like Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce and more, you can find everything in one place quickly.” The idea is to provide customers with a ChatGPT-like dialog that answers questions about all personal and work-related content in the digital universe.
In addition to being a universal search bar, Dropbox Dash is also a browser extension. The company organizes URLs into stacks, which it describes as “Smart collections of your links that provide a quick way to store, organize, and search URLs” — the same way playlists store songs. The plugin also adds a home page dashboard that displays search, stacks, shortcuts, and other suggested contextual items. Finally, Dropbox says Dash will “ultimately draw from your data and your company’s data to answer questions and surface relevant content using generative AI.” (For example, you can skip searching for your company’s internal links and pages and ask Dash when the next company holiday is.)
Trusting a company with all this information is a tall order. Dropbox wants to reassure customers that it’s ready to take on that responsibility — pledging to be transparent and not sell your data to advertisers. “In this next era of AI, it’s more important than ever that we protect our customers’ privacy, operate transparently, and limit bias in our AI technologies to build them as fairly and reliably as possible,” the company said.
As lofty as Dropbox’s ambitions are with Dash, I can’t help but see the AI-powered “search for everything” as a logical extension of modern operating systems. I’d be surprised if Apple, Microsoft, and Google haven’t already been working on their versions of an AI-filled universal search bar to eventually bake into their products at the operating system level. If these suspicions are correct, Dropbox may have a short window to establish Dash before heavy hitters intervene and make the third-party version unnecessary for most customers.
Dropbox AI for file preview is available in alpha today for Dropbox Pro customers in the US. Additionally, it is “beginning to roll out” to “select Dropbox Teams.” Finally, you can sign up for the Dropbox Dash waiting list.
