Dropbox rolls out content suggestions to highlight files you may need most

Dropbox is bringing a new content suggestions feature to the web-based version of its cloud storage service to highlight files and folders a user may want to access.

The feature has actually been in testing for several months already, and it started rolling out gradually last week, but in the coming weeks it will be available to all users through Dropbox.com.

When you’re logged into your Dropbox.com account, you’ll see a “suggested for you” row stretching across the top of the page that may contain files and folders you want to access, based on factors such as how frequently or recently you accessed them.

Above: Dropbox.com: Suggested for you

On the surface, this feels a little like a repackaging of the “recent” tab that Dropbox offers across the web and its mobile apps, but the company said the new feature is based on more signals than simply which files you have accessed most recently. Leveraging “machine intelligence,” it looks at your broader activity across the whole Dropbox platform. The new content suggestions widget is built around the Dropbox intelligence initiative (DBXi), the company’s effort to weave artificial intelligence (AI) into all of its products.

As such, “suggested for you” should improve over time, based on how you use the service and who you work with. It’s worth noting that it will only surface content you have created personally or have been granted access to.

“Our goal with this new feature is to make finding relevant content — the files and folders you’re most likely to need right now — as effortless as possible,” the company said in a statement.

This latest rollout comes hot on the heels of some notable updates at Dropbox — it recently added new file-search functionality to its desktop app, as well as filters to help Dropbox.com users search for content based on file type. And a few weeks back, Dropbox and Google finally launched their long-awaited G Suite integration that allows users to work with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides directly inside Dropbox.

While the new content suggestions are already rolling out to all users, the feature may not actually show up for everyone — it depends how much someone uses Dropbox.

A spokesperson told VentureBeat that the company intends to expand content suggestions to all Dropbox apps in the future.