I don’t know about y’all but I’m already at AI fatigue. Every app under the sun wants to tell you about the AI features they have added, and I’m typically either underwhelmed or annoyed. It’s not that I’m against the tech so much as I just want it to be done responsibly and be actually useful.

As a web worker, GitHub Copilot is the main AI thing that’s benefitted me. It was integrated in such a classy manner that I’m pleased every time I use it.

All that preamble to say that I think email is actually a pretty strong candiate for AI usage. You might say email was an early adopter of AI since spam filters are essentially massive ML models. Please keep it up.

Email is so text-heavy that it feels like LLMs are perfectly suited to be helpful in a variety of ways. Certainly writing emails is on the list, even though I’m loathe to admit it and likely be last in line to try that. I like the feeling of expressing myself exactly as I want to with my own words. But sure.

I got an email from Shortwave, and email client I think is worth keeping an eye on, about their take on it all. They are doing lots with AI and some of it actually does seem compelling. Perhaps my favorite is the very first one they list:

Using human language to instruct your email client to go dig up something that you know is there … yeah that seems useful!

Summarization seems like a classic AI feature that, while I haven’t benefited a ton from that, I can see being useful. Perhaps people that are in the 1,000+ weekly email category.

The middle one above seems the most useful to me. I’ve had people (my wife is common haha) have me read an email or text message to be like “how does this read? Does it seem to mean/nice/direct/indirect etc?”

And the last one above seems pretty cool. Like if Shortwave is paying for AI API usage anyway, might as well tack this on. As someone who gets a decent amount of support email in languages I don’t understand, having this built into an email client seems smart.