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Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

shortwave.com

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Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#41

Post by light_hue_1 »

jwngr wrote: post #2

Hi HN - Shortwave co-founder here. We’ve built a full-featured email client over the last couple of years, just in time for the rise of LLMs. We’ve added quite a few features (and are working on many more) that use LLMs to save you time. 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. W…

This is a good idea executed terribly badly. There's no world in which I would agree for my inbox to be sent to OpenAI.

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.

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#42

Post by ehsankia »

cardosof wrote: post #34

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?

While there's been a lot of attention on cases where AI fails quite poorly (such as anything requires factual information), it is actually very good in specific use cases.

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.

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#43

Post by jwngr »

cardosof wrote: post #34

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?

Email is the perfect tool for these new LLMs - most of us have years, even decades, of our writing and important information in our email archives. Now that we have AI which can understand that in a deep way, a ton of value is waiting to be unlocked and email is going to change. All of our tools will. I talked a bit more about this in our blog post today [1].

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.

[1] https://www.shortwave.com/blog/ai-email-summaries/

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#44

Post by Aeolun »

light_hue_1 wrote: post #41
jwngr wrote: post #2

Hi HN - Shortwave co-founder here. We’ve built a full-featured email client over the last couple of years, just in time for the rise of LLMs. We’ve added quite a few features (and are working on many more) that use LLMs to save you time. 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. W…

This is a good idea executed terribly badly. There's no world in which I would agree for my inbox to be sent to OpenAI. 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.

This works only with Gmail, so the people using already agreed to have someone rifle through their mails.

What is one more?

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#45

Post by Aeolun »

skilled wrote: post #9
jwngr wrote: post #2

Hi HN - Shortwave co-founder here. We’ve built a full-featured email client over the last couple of years, just in time for the rise of LLMs. We’ve added quite a few features (and are working on many more) that use LLMs to save you time. 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. W…

So the best you could do in a few years is implement the OpenAI API to summarise a bunch of text or did I read that wrong?

I think the client took a few years, and they’ve now quickly added some AI related features.

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#46

Post by warkdarrior »

einpoklum wrote: post #29

1. Don't use GMail - the US government and a bunch of commercial corporations should not be able to read your email and/or mine it for useful information to manipulate you with. 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)…

Do any of the FOSS mail clients offer summarization of emails? If not, then asking people to use a less capable email client is not a winning proposition.

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#47

Post by htrp »

jwngr wrote: post #43
cardosof wrote: post #34

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?

Email is the perfect tool for these new LLMs - most of us have years, even decades, of our writing and important information in our email archives. Now that we have AI which can understand that in a deep way, a ton of value is waiting to be unlocked and email is going to change. All of our tools will. I talked a bit more about this in our blog post today [1]. Also yes, attention is nice for a small young startup figh…

^^ co-founder of shortwave.

>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?

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#48

Post by Aeolun »

cardosof wrote: post #34

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?

Everyone wants to try playing with it. Some people are actively looking for it. And investors want to invest in it.

It sounds like the perfect storm to me.

Re: Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

#50

Post by Aeolun »

jwngr wrote: post #21
awill wrote: post #10

I tried it out, but instantly realized the 'free' version is go restrictive it's useless. I get many startups want to make sure the free version isn't too good, but here the free version is unusable. 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...

Outside of search and import history, our free version is 100% feature compatible with the paid version. None of the core functionality (including the new AI stuff) requires a paid plan. On a paid plan, you can import and search your full history. On the free plan, you can import and search your last 90 days. See our pricing page for more details ( https://www.shortwave.com/pricing/ ).

> On a paid plan, you can import and search your full history.

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.

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