My problem with this is that it contributes to the broken culture of email.
– 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.
– 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.
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.
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.
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...