How Embeddings and Clustering Reduced File Understanding Time by 96% ??
A case study from Dropbox. ????
Reading through entire documents to extract key information is time-consuming and inefficient. ??
Dropbox aimed to automate and accelerate this process.
Dropbox's engineering team introduced AI-powered summaries and Q&A for file previews.
This solution works in two phases ???:
?? Phase 1: Text Extraction and Embedding?
? Riviera converts any file type into text?
? Text is split into paragraph-sized chunks?
? Each chunk is converted into vector embeddings
? Embeddings are cached to improve efficiency for subsequent operations?
? This system processes nearly an exabyte of data daily through 300 supported file types
?? Phase 2: Content Understanding?
? For summaries: K-means clustering identifies diverse, representative chunks
? For Q&A: Embeddings match question to relevant text chunks?
? Dynamic context selection determines how much context to provide
? Direct questions receive fewer, more relevant chunks while broad questions get more context
? The system provides source references so users can verify information
?? The Results
? Processing time reduced by 96% (115s → 4s)
? Cost-per-summary cut by 93%
This combination of intelligent chunking, strategic embedding, and dynamic context selection proves to be a powerful approach for extracting meaning from unstructured data at enterprise scale. ??