💌 How AI can help with email

From Superhuman and Shortwave to Spark and Ultra, new tools to streamline your inbox. Reading time: 4 minutes ⏰

My inbox seems poised to explode. When I dive into deep work, I return to find email overflowing. To cope, I’m exploring how AI can help with searching, sorting, summarizing, and replying. Read on for a summary of new AI capabilities for saving time on email.

Spend less time on routine email ⏲️

If you devote 90 minutes or more a day to email, as many of us do, consider one or more of these five steps.

1. Automate drafting of routine replies. Shortwave AI can draft editable responses in your style, based on hundreds of your prior replies.

2. Quickly grok long threads. Superhuman AI lets you press M to get an instant bulleted summary of any long email. Alternatively, you could paste a thread into ChatGPT, or ask it to draft an email, but AI in your inbox is swifter.

3. Write shorter emails — five sentences max. Opt into Gmail’s Workspace Labs, then ask it to “write for me.” To improve a draft ask it to expand, shorten or otherwise adjust. 6 AI features are available to test within Gmail.

4. Delay your replies. Slow down back and forth threads. Use Mailbutler’s Smart Send Later to postpone delivery. As

   Adam Grant
   puts it, “your email does not constitute my emergency.”

5. Simplify your exchanges. Use Boomerang’s Respondable AI within Gmail or Outlook to conclude threads efficiently. See how it looks.

Shortwave is great if…

… You want an AI assistant that can draft new messages in your own writing style. Shortwave can look at your prior replies to determine how to draft a response that sounds like you.

• Check out the Shortwave team’s email efficiency method.

• Prompt the ChatGPT-like bot to intelligently find messages or insights in your inbox. Its answers can save you from hunting through your archive.

• Send email in multiple languages.

• Free for basic use, or $7 to $14/monthly depending on features.

To illustrate how AI can help with email, I hosted a live demo with Shortwave founder Andrew Lee. He demonstrated how he uses AI in his own inbox to find info, compose messages, translate text and chat with AI. Here’s a 3-minute video excerpt. Paid subscribers can see the full demo and summary here.

How Shortwave AI Helps with Email Efficiency

Use Superhuman if…

… You want summaries of long email threads, use AI on both desktop and mobile, rely heavily on keyboard shortcuts, or want to prompt AI with informal text it can use to create email drafts for you. 

This is my day-to-day email tool because I’ve customized my setup over the past few years, though its AI features lag those available in Shortwave.

My favorite Superhuman features aren’t actually the AI ones.

• The AI-generated emails tend not to match my style, having been trained only on a tiny subset of my outbound messages.

• I appreciate instead how quickly pages load, how useful its keyboard shortcuts are for navigating through my inbox and replying to messages, and how helpful its snippets are for templatizing my frequently-sent emails.

• I also like the contact pane that shows contextual info about your email correspondent drawn from LinkedIn and other social platforms next to their message.

• Pricing: for students and teachers, Superhuman costs $10/month, but for everyone else, it’s a steep $30/month.

A Superhuman Tool for Email?

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Try Ultra if…

… You want AI to show you tasks sitting inside your inbox. Ultra also lets you customize how it summarizes your email. And you can chat with it. Type “Show me the most important of today’s messages,” to see significant emails sifted out from inbox clutter. There’s even a metrics tab, showing you how many messages you’ve received lately, among other stats. Ultra, having recently launched, feels a bit raw to me, lacking features Superhuman, Shortwave and others offer.

Consider Spark if…

… You want the cheapest AI email offering, $5/month; if you’d like to choose between short or detailed AI-generated summaries; or if you’d like AI editing help to proofread, rephrase or adjust the tone of your messages.

How are you using AI for email or other efficiencies? Leave a comment 👇