Last year, Google executives launched an email app called Shortwave. It aims to fill the gap left by the search giant’s Inbox app. Now, the company has AI-powered summaries so you don’t have to read long emails or threads to get the gist.
Powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3, this feature is available as a free beta on all platforms. The company says summaries also work well when translating emails from other languages. Shortwave has tested this feature with different kinds of use cases, from skimming through newsletters to watching a lot of emails in a short amount of time.
Additionally, the company says users can include summaries of previous messages when forwarding emails. Others can read this summary and quickly get context for the conversation, even if they’re not using Shortwave.
The startup plans to introduce more AI-powered features in the future, including more summarization methods and smart creation. We also want to introduce semantic search that allows users to search for phrases such as “What time does my flight depart next Tuesday?”
“The new capabilities of our large-scale language model have opened the door wide for new ways to interact with our inbox. Starting with a summary, we are launching the beta today,” the blog post said.
Shortwave says free users will get some access to these AI-powered features in the future. However, the company is evaluating pricing strategies during the test phase of the summarization feature.
Shortwave is free for basic use, but also offers a $9/month subscription for power users and custom plans for teams. Aside from AI-powered features, Shortwave offers better categorization than Gmail, grouping emails based on time, mentioning teammates, pinning emails, support for emojis and his GIF responses. The app treats emails as items on your to-do list, so you can snooze them or mark them as done.
Generating summaries for different kinds of media formats is a big use case for large language models. Last month, meeting minutes company Otter launched a bot that automatically summarizes meetings. Microsoft’s new AI-powered products like Bing and Edge can also summarize pages and documents. There are also other tools that provide links to YouTube videos and an overview from his Slack thread to his resume.
