Have you ever lost a receipt you needed for a refund? Or misplaced an important tax document? Or forgot a bill and incurred a fine? I’ve done all three. (More than once!)
As we go through life, we come across many documents that we might need in the future. Organizing these documents takes time and effort. So, if you’re anything like me, you might end up with piles of papers lying around your house (or PDFs scattered across your computer desktop). And good luck finding them when you actually need them.
I joined Google a couple of years ago when my education startup, Socratic, was acquired. At Socratic, we used Google’s computer vision and language understanding to make learning easier for high school students. I wondered if we could apply the same technologies to make organizing documents easier.
To experiment with this idea, my colleague Mathew Cowan and I joined Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator. We worked with DocAI, a team in Google Cloud whose artificial intelligence has helped companies analyze billions of documents. We found that by applying DocAI’s enterprise technology to personal documents, we could help people get organized.
