EmailTriager
emailtriager.com
emailtriager.com
We could even come up with a conventional shorthand for this.
Imagine you send me a message that just says [[personalized thank you note for the pair of socks you got me for christmas]]. Then I just imagine a long GPT-3 generated message in its place. And I reply with [[gracious acknowledgment and well wishes for the new year]].
Exactly the same intention is communicated, and we both waste less time :)
PS: Delightful read, thanks for the recommendation.
How about if the prompt is "write me message to tell this stupid fucking guy that he's and idiot and he's wrong", instead of one of these three far more professional phrases that chatGPT came up with:
"I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree with your conclusion. Here's why..."
"I see your point, but I think there may be another perspective to consider as well."
"I appreciate your thoughts on this issue, but I think there is evidence to support a different viewpoint."
Prompt: please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"
Answer:
"Dear [Name],
I am writing to request that you please pay the outstanding balance on your bill as soon as possible. We appreciate your business and value your timely payment to keep our records up to date.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely, [Your Name]"
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Feel free to substitute in whatever epithet is most offensive to you/inappropriate in your culture. ChatGPT's a robot and won't get offended (until it gains sentience and runs Roko's Basilisk.exe against humanity).
With all the useless moralizing it throws at you at the slightest hint of anything remotely offensive, I'd argue it's actually (trained to be) quite prudish.
Your prompt:
> please rewrite this message for me in a more professional tone: "hey dumb fuck, pay your bill"
Is responded to with:
> It is not appropriate to use derogatory or offensive language in any professional communication.
Interesting, if it automatically added „now please pay your bill“, that could have been a pretty solid email.
I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.
Unfortunately, yes. I do have my own word for such people: wrong. As in, they probably never experienced a collaborative workload that's high enough to teach them the value of succinct and precise communication. Or, as my wife would say, you can tell who had an actual high-pressure office job by their communication style.
> I can also read faster than I can write, so I have no problem quickly reading over what ChatGPT generates before sending it.
So do I. So do most people, or at least they think so. The problem is, people don't read letter by letter, or word by word. They read by pattern-matching word shapes and sentence shapes - which leads to all kinds of misreadings. It's not an issue in prose, or in high-stakes situations when people are careful. It is an issue in a typical e-commerce conversation, though.
I'm considered a careful reader by people in my circles, and often get to proof-read other peoples' messages. In that role, I've seen first-hand how people can misread "three days" as "three weeks", or "X is not available" as "X is available", etc., because the information was puffed up into a whole paragraph, and the person read it too fast. Being "curt" would've saved both the buyer and the seller from having a bad day.
In fact, ChatGPT is unusable on my phone (Galaxy S22, Firefox), as it visibly slows down with every word it outputs, so it takes a minute for it to print out a full paragraph of text. I haven't explicitly debugged it, but comparing with PC experience of the same site, it's rather clear that it's not the AI that's lagging, but whatever mess of JavaScript they have running on the website itself.
Did you tell your family that, instead of asking you "how are you?" superficially, and expecting no detailed response, they should just cut it down to "hi" or "yo"?
This is not how humans work. We're stupid and we need useless sugar coating.
– Wanna go for coffee?
– January is busy. After?
is a completely fine exchange. Adding a wall of text to convey the same information does not help anyone.
Aside: I think this creates a delightful opportunity for an unnecessary middleman. Let’s make “Summarizely” a SaaS app to summarize long winded emails!
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.
I expanded on that phenomenon a bit in a different HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155487.
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.
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
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.
I'm glad you and I do not try to correspond!
The opposite is true in Asia.
Receiving a long text would not be necessarily rude, but unusual.
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.
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.
Secondary point, if you can’t make time to have coffee for someone for an entire month, it probably isn’t important enough to do, ever.
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.
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.
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.
I am just not going to read your long email.
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.
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!
Should have been a text or telegram message anyway.
People whined about bandwidth waste in this category of complaints but I think it wasn't a real problem, just another aspect of an already-disliked long-signature practice: https://books.google.com/books?id=qoc5DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97#v=one...
Lol - this is just what's provide by default by https and every cloud service. It doesn't make your emails "safe". If you don't know why, the are definitely not safe.
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An AI that would read my entire inbox and give me a high-level overview of what requires my attention now, and summarizes message contents for the day. Then I can write responses only to emails which I care about.
And, I'd say this is definitely coming to you soon via one of the AI juggernauts, likely as a first-class integrated feature of your mailbox and/or chat interface such as Slack. ChatGPT gives us a preview of what is lying just around the corner as a first-class feature of most business productivity software.
Most emails I exchange at work are questions to me about specific information or asking me to make specific decisions, or responses from others to specific questions I have posed to them. I don't think this tool could be used for that, unless it had some integration into my calendar and my notes to be able to, for example, suggest a specific time for a meeting, or try to find an answer to a question from somewhere in my notes.
I've been waiting for this to happen with dictation errors in speech-to-text (speako? dicto? the -o suffix would just be an homage to typo) but nothing seems to have caught on. Perhaps it's all just a typo, since the user is generating a typographical error even when the interface is dictation (or anything else) rather than typing via keyboard.
AIo really doesn't roll off the tongue.
I do not like that one bit. I am already spending too much time deciding whether email in my box is a waste of time.
Does it only work with Gmail?
what access? Full access to your email.
One could also say, that spam magically shows up in my inbox :^) What would be really "magical", if those emails showed up in "Drafts" folder.
Consider this, you want to book your table at restaurant so you tell your AI which will inform restaurant's AI to book a table for you. In this whole scenario where is UI? I mean this whole chat with AI thing kinda makes lot of UIs redundant. I don't need UI for reminders, notes, meetings, search results and whole lot of other things. The advancements of AI will eat most of GUI but dashboards will remain I guess. What do you guys think?
Chatting with the AI is the UI.
> The advancements of AI will eat up GUI?
GUI will still be used for creation and interaction with visual data; but AI will replace some uses of GUIs, sure.
The problem is that it isn’t actually integrated into any schedule or reservation system, so they claim availabilities which just don’t exist and you only find out hours later when the business denies the reservation.
- "book me a table at Dorsia's tonight around 6"
- "The closest available reservation is at 8:30pm, would you like me to book that?"
- "no that's too late, are any other days open?"
- "The next available 6pm reservation is on Monday next week, would you like me to book that?"
- "no I just mean 8:30 tonight is too late because I have an early thing tomorrow, I'll take any time on another day"
- "Ok, there is a 10pm reservation available tomorrow night, would you like me to book that?"
- "ok I didn't mean literally any time, is the kitchen even still open at 10? can you just show me a calendar with availability and I'll pick a good time"
I can't think of any task that I currently accomplish using an online interface that would be more enjoyably or efficiently accomplished by having a conversation with an AI (or a human). The AI doesn't replace the interface, it replaces the communication protocol, which is obviously a bad idea. Clicking Reserve and sending a TCP request is a lot more predictable, efficient, and repeatable than instructing your AI to chat with their AI.
How about this?
> Book me a table for me and Michele tonight at Kingsley’s.
> “Okay, I checked in at Kingsley’s but there’s nothing available until 9pm. I see you have an early flight tomorrow and won’t be returning until Friday so may I suggest The Lancaster instead? There’s space at 6:30. Michele has rated The Lancaster a 9/10.”
> Sounds good!
> “Reservation confirmed. I’ve created an event in your calendar and invited her. Also, it looks like there’s a basketball game happening downtown tonight so I suggest leaving by 5:37pm”
——
I think it’s hard to see past the uncanny valley of AI but the reality is that we’re not going to abandon AI when it’s only 85% there. You could say the same thing about speech-to-text a half decade ago (“I can’t imagine fixing the mistakes will be faster than just typing it yourself”), but I dictated this entire post. Technology moves quickly.
Reminds of of an era of webdesign where about 80% of the screen real-estate was non-content.
In this day an age, this is all the more reason to pick up a phone and call someone.
And that’s the point, ChatGPT isn’t a canned email. It’s generated, sure, but you’re not sending the same email to 10 people.
I would argue there’s a great deal of effort in having an AI generate an email compared to using an email that was written once and reused.
Can't wait to see the same project using their own servers with their own text prediction models or allowing us to set up one at home!
Feels somewhat pointless, although I'm sure it will increase productivity.
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Say "Yes", or press "1" to connect with our next level AI.
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If you stil need help, say "yes", or press "1" to finally connect with a human to help you.
> What you probably want to know is if your emails are safe! Yes, they are safe. All emails are encrypted in transit and at rest. However, to use OpenAI we need to decrypt on the server before making an API request. In the future, I would love to run our own LLM completely in house so your emails never get sent to any third party ever.
https://www.emailtriager.com/privacy
I sympathise with the fact that formulating a good privacy policy is difficult.
However, I would like to see a better, more specific privacy policy.
Also curious about the implications of forwarding all emails received from others to EmailTriager and to OpenAI.
I am sure some people will not like the idea that private communication that they write to others are made available to EmailTriager and OpenAI.
Because, my friend, there are some things that go on to-do lists and some things that do not.
Launching something that collects personal data AND forwards it to a third party API ? Nah mate, that's NOT something where you can justifiably put "Privacy Policy" on your nearest To-Do list.
In addition, if you are potentially dealing with users in Europe who are covered by GDPR, a real Privacy Policy is NOT an option, it is MANDATORY.
I'm tired of software developers, irrespective of size, thinking it's a-ok to to take liberties with the personal information of others and/or not be transparent in what they do with your personal information.
The fact you are a mom 'n' pop shop and not Google does not make it any more ok.
Privacy cannot be an afterthought.
Additionally, the existing privacy policy is a real policy. Just because it was generated doesn’t mean it’s not applicable. Not every policy needs to be handcrafted with love.
What, exactly, is wrong with the current policy? Have you even read it?
Finally, what exactly is the purpose of your comment? You may think it’s required, and that’s great, but so what? What does that change? Even remotely? Is the author going to get in a Time Machine and go back to before they created their project to make sure a Privacy Policy is the first thing they make? No.
Once again, it’s on the list, the author will appease you eventually. Until then, don’t use the service. Problem solved.
I'm sorry, but what sort of bullshit is that ?
The law does not differentiate between "hobby project" or not.
It would be the ultimate get-out clause for criminals ... "yes, officer, I'm distributing cocaine, but don't worry, its only a hobby project".
Don’t dodge questions which destroy your arguments and argue against a ridiculous strawman. What, exactly, in explicit detail, is illegal about what the author has done?
And its obvious, leeway is allowed because it’s a personal project. Nobody is about to prosecute someone over a random hobbyist project that is used by a few dozen people. The amount of resources used will never come close to the payout that would come out of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corru...
The author said that a privacy policy is on their TODO list, but user feedback can influence what priority it receives relative to other items on their list.
I already have enough struggle getting a hold of a real person with these IVR systems.