Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by falcor84 299 days ago
> it's slightly annoying to have to write your own emails.

I find that to be a massive understatement. The amount of time, effort and emotional anguish that people expend on handling emails is astronomical. According to various estimates, email-handling takes somewhere around 25% of the work time of an average knowledge worker, going up to over 50% for some roles, and that most people check and reply to emails on evenings and over weekends at least occasionally.

I'm not sure it's possible, but it is my dream that I'd have a capable AI "secretary" that would process my email and respond in my tone based on my daily agenda, only interrupting for exceptional situations where I actually need to make a choice, or to pen a new idea to further my agenda.

4 comments

I am French living in Germany, the amount of time Claude saves me every week by reviewing the emails I send to contractors, customers is incredible. It is very hard to write good idiomatic German while ensuring no grammar and spelling mistakes.

I second you, just for that, I would continue paying for a subscription, that I can also use it for coding, toying with ideas, quickly look for information, extract information out of documents, everything out of a simple chat interface is incredible. I am old, but I live in the future now :-)

At my job it takes about 50% of my time. I love LLMs but I don't see how they can possible help me with email.

I would have to write a prompt that is almost exactly the same as writing the email. It is not like I am writing a fictional story that the LLM could somehow compress the main ideas. I feel like the LLM would have to be able to read my mind to properly respond to my inbox.

Email is just communication. It seems appropriate that knowledge workers spend a lot of time communicating.
Do you have any citations for various estimates? This is super interesting to me.