Launch HN: Poly (YC S22) – Cursor for Files

Summary

Hello world, this is Abhay from Poly (https://poly.app). We’re building an app to replace Finder/File Explorer with something more intelligent and searchable. Think of it like Dropbox + NotebookLM + Perplexity for terabytes of your files. Here’s a quick demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsqCySU4Ln0.Poly can search your content in natural language, across a broad range of file types and down to the page, paragraph, pixel, or point in time. We also provide an integrated agent that can take actions on your files such as creating, editing, summarizing, and researching. Any action that you can take, the agent can also take, from renaming, moving, tagging, annotating, and organizing files for you. The agent can also read URLs, youtube links, and can search the web and even download files for you.Here are some public drives that you can poke around in (note: it doesn’t work in Safari yet—sorry! we’re working on it.)Every issue of the Whole Earth Catalogue: https://poly.app/shared/whole-earth-cataloguesArchive of old Playstation Manuals: https://poly.app/shared/playstation-manuals-archiveMini archive of Orson Welles interviews and commercial spots: https://poly.app/shared/orson-welles-archiveArchive of Salvador Dali’s paintings for Alice in Wonderland: https://poly.app/shared/salvador-dali-alice-in-wonderlandTo try it out, navigate to one of these public folders and use the agent or search to find things. The demo video above can give you an idea of how the UI roughly works. Select files by clicking on them. Quick view by pressing space. Open the details for any file by pressing cmd + i. You can search from the top middle bar (or press cmd + K), and all searches will use semantic similarity and search within the files. Or use the agent from the bottom right tools menu (or press cmd + ?) and you can ask about the files, have the agent search for you, summarize things, etc.We decided to build this after launching an early image-gen company back in March 2022, and realizin...