Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail
shortwave.com
shortwave.com
https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/05/irtnog_by_...
I’m most excited about Smart Summaries — they’ll read and then summarize (even from a different language) long newsletters & those huge threads you just don’t want to wade through.
We’ve got a long way to go, so please do leave us feedback if you have it. Shortwave is much of the early Firebase team, and HN really helped us building that product :) Thanks in advance!
Literally people's most private messages, and even privileged conversations, are being shared with a 3rd party. One with no track record, no audits, not much in the way of controls. Hard pass.
There will be a breach of OpenAI one day. The only question is if it's your emails that will be leaked.
What is one more?
Going from 0 to 9 USD / month is steep. Apparently, everyone has Silicon Valley salaries now, for some app.
EDIT: apparently, they changed the title. props for that. :)
A feature like that could make the $9/month more compelling. What I’d really love is that plus the ability for the client to work fully independently of Shortwave’s servers, so that when they invariably get acquired I can continue to use it.
* Ton of value.
* GPT-3 makes it easy to gain that value.
It's a little bit like the Internet gold rush of the .com boom. I have no idea who'll be left standing, but there's something transformational here.
I personally find it very useful for answering NP-hard-like questions (Hard to find an answer to, easy to verify answer is correct), such as when I have something on the tip of my tongue or looking for a specific term/word.
It's also fairly good at summarizing, as well as generating text. You may not want to send the e-mail as is, but it can be a good starting point for drafting an email or message.
These seem like specific value add, especially in the context of an email frontend.
Also yes, attention is nice for a small young startup fighting against a bunch of giant companies who've been doing email for decades. Marketing is indeed a thing :) But we stand by Smart Summaries as a feature that actually makes your email experience better and faster. And we plan to build more soon.
>Shortwave's most prominent action is done — akin to archiving on other email apps — because it's the recommended way to clean up your inbox. Items marked done are removed from your inbox, but remain easily accessible via search and the Done page.
Can you automatically recommend the e-mails that I need to mark as done or do I need to do that manually?
It sounds like the perfect storm to me.
2. With this kind of frontend, you're just adding more entities which scrutinize your email and your behavior patterns. Oh, and apparently this costs a bunch of money to really use.
3. The appropriate frontend for email services (even GMail) is a FOSS mail client.
Here's a list of many of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients
I use Thunderbird personally, which is ok-ish and somewhat extensible.
> less capable
Funny.
Our summarization feature is entirely opt-in. So if you're concerned about sharing your emails with OpenAI, you can choose not to use the feature. You can also read our Privacy Policy [2] and Terms of Service [3] to see how your data is used.
[1] https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is... [2] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/privacy-policy/ [3] https://www.shortwave.com/policies/terms-of-service/
Before I realized this I was under the impression that my emails are being marked as read too.
Otherwise, shortwave strength is that it's keyboard driven. You can read, delete, label emails all via keyboard.
As for marking stuff as read: this is a known issue that we are planning to address. For now, it behaves like archive in Gmail, which does not mark as read. How would you like it to work?
More AI driven features are good probably, but the whole product being AI driven is questionable.
I don't appreciate the Gmail archive very much. I have a pile of emails I want to get rid of (delete) which archiving does not help with. It actually increases the size of the pile when you archive unread emails. I would just like an option to mark an email as read when I mark it done in shortwave.
I opened the website and the first thing I see is “Intelligent email, powered by AI”, with “by AI” highlighted with a gradient. I scroll down and the first feature is “Summarize with AI”. I don’t fault the other commenter for thinking you’ve pivoted to the AI craze, that is the vibe you’re sending very loudly.
Does OpenAI keep the queries? I mean, it is just a POST request and the server probably logs it all, then there is the matter of if the actual AI keeps the data.
(c) Use of Content to Improve Services. One of the main benefits of machine learning models is that they can be improved over time. To help OpenAI provide and maintain the Services, you agree and instruct that we may use Content to develop and improve the Services. You can read more here about how Content may be used to improve model performance. We understand that in some cases you may not want your Content used to improve Services. You can opt out of having Content used for improvement by contacting support@openai.com with your organization ID. Please note that in some cases this may limit the ability of our Services to better address your specific use case.
Edit: Oh, OpenAI is partially owned by Microsoft so unlikely at this point. The real tech here is OpenAI APIs. Swapping it out on the backend with something else could drastically change it's usefulness.
Also, $9/mo for a frontend for gmail is just way too much. $108/y ??? If you're going to pay that much, surely you'd just get off gmail entirely. Why pay that much but still give up all your privacy...
Now, I don’t know about you, but I have 15 years of Gmail history. I don’t think you can claim searching/looking at all that isn’t ‘core functionality’ for an email client.
I don’t begrudge you the need to charge something for it, but to claim the free version has full functionality is a bit misleading.