Abstract: Techniques and systems are presented for providing “contextual insights,” or information that is tailored to the context of the content a user is consuming or authoring. Given a request for information about a topic, which may be indicated by a user gesture in an application, one or more queries to search services may be formulated without requiring entry of a search query directly by a user. Moreover, techniques and systems may leverage the context of the content the user is consuming or authoring, as well as user, device, and application metadata, to construct the queries and to organize and filter the results into relevant contextual insights.