Ashok K. Chandra

Contextual insights

In todays productivity environment, users are constantly researching topics while consuming or authoring content in applications such as e-readers, word processors, presentation programs, or social networks. However, none of these applications sufficiently enable users to do their research directly within the application. In fact, users typically have to switch to a browser and write a query on a search engine. Switching to a search engine is distracting and hurts productivity. Furthermore, the main problem is that the search engine is not aware of important user context such as the book that they are reading or the document they are authoring. To tackle this problem, we introduce the notion of contextual insights: providing users with information that is contextually relevant to the content that they are consuming or authoring. We then present Leibniz, a system that provides a solution for the contextual insights problem.