ABBYY’s creator David Yang launched a new app – Findo aimed to help with the searches in email, contacts and documents. According to the developer, the difference between standard search and Findo is that you search for the information not by the keywords but asking a question like you do in Google now.

According to ABBYY’s research 20% of users can’t find the information they need right away. Telling you the truth I think the percentage is bigger, as having several email boxes, cloud drives like Google Drive and Dropbox, it’s sometimes hard for me to find the needed e-mail or a document.

Findo’s developers claim that the program can find the information you need in your emails, local documents and cloud storages using “real life” questions.

For example “Find me the tickets I ordered last month”.

In addition Findo  will search in all the programms, cloud storages and services you use.

To find the information, the app uses ABBYY’s artificial intelligence program named Compreno and with time it learns information about your important events, projects and so on, so they can be used as milestones for the search. “Find the contact of the guy I met in Boston last month”. So due to self-education the quality of search results is expected to get better.

So far the program is available only in English, and the list of apps it is compatible with is not so big – Findo can look for the information in Gmail, Google Drive, Dropbox, Outlook, Yahoo! and Exchange, but soon we are promised to have support of Evernote, Trello and Onedrive.

The app can work through web interface or iOS app, also there is a desktop app.

The idea is really great, as while writing this article I had several people asking me for the documents I was sent earlier and it took me more than 5 minutes to find them in my mailbox.

At the same time I added my personal mailbox to Findo to test it. As my mailbox has not been cleared for years and contains 11 Gb’s of emails, it’s still being indexed. It took some 30 minutes to index 3 percent, so I wasn’t able to play with it enough to recommend it.

Update. This is how FIndo looks 11 hours later with 45% of emails indexed. So far none of the searches returned the result I was looking for. Let’s wait few more hours when indexing is finished.

If you are already using Findo, let us know about your experience.