There’s still the ability to just type out half a sentence. Digging a bit deeper, is your concern that “if there’s a tool, people will use it”?
Aside: I think this creates a delightful opportunity for an unnecessary middleman. Let’s make “Summarizely” a SaaS app to summarize long winded emails!
> Digging a bit deeper, is your concern that “if there’s a tool, people will use it”?
That is a big part of what software industry does to society, isn't it? If there's a tool, people will use it, and when enough people use it, it becomes expected or even required to use it.
100%, it just contributes to the digital landfill that is our inboxes.
Good emails should be written like pseudo code, I suspect this will happen or emails will finally die for something that provides this type of capability of exchanging information in order to facilitate decision making.
Anyone remember google wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave) - I remember playing around with it with a few friends thinking there is definatley something in it.
What's a shame is that that they gave up on it. There was clearly a need for new tool in that space. Though, these days where we're at is a shared Google doc with commenting.
In the 90's the notion of autonomous agents negotiating to fullfil our goals were for a brief period all the rage.
Being able to tell an AI what you want and have it translated to actual goals for agents to use to negotiate, and have the result of their search translated back to concise plain text would be great.
Personally, I switched to voice messages (via WhatsApp or Slack). It doesn't work for everything, but... if I know this will take me more than a minute to type, it is going to be a voice message. If it requires visual aid – Loom.
The only problem with audio/Loom messages is that it is not easily indexable, but that's a tooling problem that can be easily solved.
I rarely use email (I may ask someone to compose an email for me). In this setup, I do see value if I had a Slack bot that I could say to "ask lawyers for an update on X". But even then, people would immediately know that the email came not from "me"...
Personally, I'd like to see more tooling around
* using AI to auto-polish video/audio communication, e.g. remove long pauses, skip filler words, etc.
* summarizing video/audio/text communication into bullet points of intel and actions
Same here. Audio messages are easy to create for the sender but a nightmare to parse for the receiver. Whenever I receive an audio message I automatically tend to assume that the sender thinks of their time as more valuable than the receiver, which is acceptable in some cases (from busy PhD advisor to advisee) but I find unacceptable in other cases, for example in peer-to-peer communication.
+1 but the sad part is that this is trivial to fix with Whisper yet I'm not seeing the integrations in popular messaging apps. just put the text blurb in there automatically already!
> if I know this will take me more than a minute to type, it is going to be a voice message
This just shifts the burden from you to the recipient. I don't want to listen to a 1-minute voice message where you pause and try to collect your thoughts, rather than spend two seconds reading two sentences.
I think the future of work communication is going to be something similar to what these guys are doing https://www.volleyapp.com/ I don't Volley is there yet (or even close), but the concept is on the right path: async video/audio/3D stitched into a coherent narrative thanks to AI.
Input and high quality audio is the biggest barrier at the moment.
When I say input, I mean that we need something similar to sousveillance tech that can contribute to conversation without me actively switching context. Just like we would in a real-world conversation.
When I say audio, I mean that no one wants to listen poorly articulated voice messages that are hard to follow. We need tech that can make each of us sound smart.
It will happen. Few interesting startups in this space.
Ironically, based on my experience working in consulting and with exec level folks, what most people need is something that turns long meandering emails into text like your example
Good emails are short and give only the most relevant info and "ask" of the recipient. Most emails people send get ignored or misunderstood because they expect too much from the recipient, who, unless it's a major priority, doesn't have the time to try and figure out what they're supposed to do from the email.
I expect this kind of thing will never get traction in most business applications, but an email shortener, definitely.
As a rule of thumb, 90% of emails essence is contained in the second from last sentence in the email (usually an ask; don't believe me, just check your inbox). If it is a long email, that's the only part I am going to read.
Almost no one has too busy of a schedule to not squeeze in a 30-60 minute conversation over coffee within a month.
If I ask someone to coffee and their response is, next month? I’d take it as a clear signal that the content of our conversation or our relationship is not important.
I think it is that “next month” is probably an indication of importance and “next month” will be busy too / the importance of a message you want an AI to spam back… still not important.
It is true that there is a risk of AI adding creating content that is unnecessarily verbose. This could end up consuming time and putting a higher cognitive load on the humans who ultimately read these emails.
On the other hand, these AI systems will only advance over time. It's certainly within the realm of possibility that these systems will be able to write with increased brevity. Additionally, much like current recommendation algorithms, they will likely adapt to specific needs and styles of a given user.
Whatever the case, we can expect many changes to the way we communicate in the coming years. You might even say it's a brave new world!
It was on the NTK email list (UK-based tech newsletter) in the late 90s / early 2000s - http://www.ntk.net/ - when people had limited bandwidth on their dial-up connections. Possibly more of a principle along the lines of "save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves" but I remember it clearly.
Aside: I think this creates a delightful opportunity for an unnecessary middleman. Let’s make “Summarizely” a SaaS app to summarize long winded emails!