Lenovo Windows 10 Devices Receive Supercharged Cortana Capabilities With REACHit

Lenovo and Microsoft have teamed up to offer Lenovo-brand PC users a smarter Cortana experience. The way they've accomplished that is by pairing Cortana with REACHit, the latter of which Lenovo designed to help users manager their files and find what they're looking for in a faster, more efficient way. By integrating REACHit with Cortana, the latter's search capabilities are greatly expanded.

The two technologies play off each other to extend the sources from which content can be found. Once a user creates a unique Lenovo ID, Cortana and REACHit can be utilized to access a wide variety of data through a plethora of sources, including local storage, cloud services, emails, and any Lenovo device running Windows 10.

Cortana and REACHit

To use one of Lenovo's examples, you could ask Cortana to find the pictures you showed Tim last week. REACHit then breaks the command down into simple parts. In this case, it would the file type you're looking for (photos), the time frame (last week), and who you were with (Tim).

"This makes it possible for Cortana to search just what you remember about your content even if you don't remember the file name," Lenovo explains.


To give another example, let's say you edited a photo on your Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon last month and want to access it on your Lenovo ThinkPad 10 tablet away from home. However, you forgot the name of the file, and it's too far of a drive to retrieve your laptop.  You could simply say, "Cortana, find the pictured I edited last month on my ThinkPad X1 Carbon."

While there's obviously some heavy Lenovo integration taking place, the cool thing about this is the variety of sources Cortana and REACHit can sift through, especially cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and OneDrive.

Lenovo will release a beta version of Cortana and REACHit working together when Windows 10 launches this summer. A final version will be available in the fall.