Aro is a new organization tool for Android phones, combining a bit of semantic search, contextually-aware email and actionable contact management for an intelligent use of your smartphone.  Launching at the Web 2.0 Summit today, Aro is entering its public beta with plenty of fanfare.

A long-running project by Kiha Software, the Seattle-based startup has been working for years on a tool that will help you organize your mobile content in a way that makes sense.  For Aro, much of this has to do with contextualizing your contacts, and structuring information and actions around your relationships.  The idea is to make your phone interactions more efficient and sensible.

Aro does so by leveraging its natural language search, which taps into your various accounts (i.e. Gmail, Facebook, etc.) in order to structure content around your contacts.  Now you can pull up a friend in your contacts list, and immediately view your ongoing correspondence with them via email or SMS, send them a photo, or schedule an event. It’s a concept many are going to take with their socially oriented apps, including Facebook, which revealed a new take on email messaging at a press event yesterday.

The natural language capabilities alone required a great deal of research for the Aro team, as CTO Andrew Hickl tells me in an interview last week. “We really had to understand the degree in variation in the language people use,” Hickl explains.  “Early on we started identifying the guy that doesn’t use any capital letters, or no punctuation.  Losing those cues makes it difficult to use off-the-shelf systems.  You really have to be able to translate SMS-speak.”

Beyond this, Aro features actionable contact management from multiple access points, minimizing the times you have to skip from one app to another in order to pull up information or mark something, like an appointment or message.   Aro leverages cloud-based semantic processing and data extraction to analyze, organize and connect relevant information no matter where it is on your phone.

It’s because of this app-agnostic approach that Aro is designed as an Android tool, seeing as Apple has yet to free data from its apps for developer purposes.  It’s a major point of interest, as cross-app interaction is going to be a big step in app culture in the coming year.  It will reduce delineation amongst mobile apps, and really empower platform approaches such as Aro to make your Android work better for your needs.

Core features include:

Aro’s quick action menus enable intuitive, context-relevant actions at a touch within and across core applications such as email, phone, contacts and calendar.

AroSearch delivers relevant, timely information in the context of the task you are trying to accomplish, no matter the application, including people, messages, files, attachments, events and even the Web.

Aro Email unifies and synchronizes email, messages and posts from multiple accounts and social networks and lets users view messages by author, date, topic, and thread.

Aro Calendar makes scheduling a meeting easier than ever before, and has built in location-awareness and smart travel buffers to help you get there on-time.

Aro Contacts automatically recognizes people in your life and automatically tracks and connects email addresses, phone numbers and company names.

AroStream delivers prioritized conversations and content in real-time via a dynamic device wallpaper.