Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features.
I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?
Email is the perfect tool for these new LLMs - most of us have years, even decades, of our writing and important information in our email archives. Now that we have AI which can understand that in a deep way, a ton of value is waiting to be unlocked and email is going to change. All of our tools will. I talked a bit more about this in our blog post today [1].
Also yes, attention is nice for a small young startup fighting against a bunch of giant companies who've been doing email for decades. Marketing is indeed a thing :) But we stand by Smart Summaries as a feature that actually makes your email experience better and faster. And we plan to build more soon.
>Shortwave's most prominent action is done — akin to archiving on other email apps — because it's the recommended way to clean up your inbox. Items marked done are removed from your inbox, but remain easily accessible via search and the Done page.
Can you automatically recommend the e-mails that I need to mark as done or do I need to do that manually?
While there's been a lot of attention on cases where AI fails quite poorly (such as anything requires factual information), it is actually very good in specific use cases.
I personally find it very useful for answering NP-hard-like questions (Hard to find an answer to, easy to verify answer is correct), such as when I have something on the tip of my tongue or looking for a specific term/word.
It's also fairly good at summarizing, as well as generating text. You may not want to send the e-mail as is, but it can be a good starting point for drafting an email or message.
These seem like specific value add, especially in the context of an email frontend.
I think is a mix, there are probably a lot of areas where it does provide value and it's getting to a point where training or tuning existing models is low hanging fruit for those areas. There is for sure another whole section of this that is "second life" like for marketing teams -- where they want to market something in the AI space to try to ride the wave. I fear a lot of the executions coming right now are "just do something with AI".
There's a lot of value to be unlocked over this decade and not very many people know where that value is at (so most will flail around trying to find something useful). There will be a massive amount of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.
Yes, they are solving a problem (make it simple and faster, save time, etc) for the end user. For a subset of products, they are just jumping on the bandwagon first and deciding what do do next. The value is real and once in a generation.
Also yes, attention is nice for a small young startup fighting against a bunch of giant companies who've been doing email for decades. Marketing is indeed a thing :) But we stand by Smart Summaries as a feature that actually makes your email experience better and faster. And we plan to build more soon.
[1] https://www.shortwave.com/blog/ai-email-summaries/