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.
>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?
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.
Exactly. I wasn't specific because I thought it was obvious. I need to search for old emails all the time. I'd hardly want to use shortwave sometimes, but flip to Gmail multiple times a day.
I thought that limitation was by design to make sure 'free-tier' people didn't overwhelm your service.
Despite adding some AI features, we are definitely still focused on the core triage and workflow of getting through your inbox. We've launched a bunch of other stuff already this year (https://www.shortwave.com/changelog/) and have more non-AI features coming.
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?
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.
The homepage of site now advertising AI features on the top. Which feels like that summarization is just the first thing and there are more AI driven features yet to come. It feels like its going to shift focus on AI as a top priority.
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.
Can you expand more on OpenAI's policy on if it retains the queries that are sent? I understand you are not using the training feature, and I am talking about the non-training queries you are sending it.
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.
(a) Your Content. You may provide input to the Services (“Input”), and receive output generated and returned by the Services based on the Input (“Output”). Input and Output are collectively “Content.” ...
(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.
We use OpenAI's GPT-3 API to generate summaries. We have explicitly opted out of OpenAI's default behavior of using their APIs to train their models [1].
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.
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.
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!
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.
Same: I was about to sign up then said, "oh wait, hell no, I'm not giving access to this company to ALL of my emails". Google/Alphabet has access and that is enough for now.
Why are you focusing on being AI driven now? Shortwave has been great already. This seems more like an attempt to capture some crowd via current AI hype. I don't know but it may also work in reverse giving a sense of less privacy or something.
I go into this a bit more in our blog post from today [1], but we believe LLMs are going to transform how we interact with email. Yes, you still need a solid inbox with labels and contacts and push notifications and everything else that email clients like Shortwave offer. And we will continue to iterate on and nail that experience. But these new tools allow us to push the boundaries of what can be done with email, and we intend to do just that.
I would have prioritized shipping a real client to Android users instead of an LLM first. There have been promises of upgrading the experience forever and the web wrapper has seen few and far improvements in I want to say two years now.
You're right. We're a small team of 10 people [1] and we have to ruthlessly prioritize. Gmail on web and iOS are our primary platforms right now. Our Android app is in beta and will be for longer. In the meantime, are improving the PWA experience. We just shipped a brand new inbox last week that has much better support for the Android PWA - finally fixes the back button issue we heard a lot about! I know it's not a native app, but that's not practical for our team right now. It will be eventually though.
I like many others have a hard stop at sending our entire inbox to a third party. Is there any way you’ll be able to provide the same functionality to local users or are you married to using cloud functions?
Hey HN Co-founder and head of product at Shortwave here. Excited to share our latest feature – Smart Summaries. Summaries act like your personal AI email assistant, working to save you precious time by using AI to intelligently summarize key points from an email in seconds.
We’re launching today in open beta! We’d love to hear your feedback. We’re looking to double-down on AI features going forward. Would love to have feedback!
Thanks! Our keyboard shortcuts are pretty extensive too [1]. Let us know if there's a shortcut missing that you'd like to see!
Beyond price, there are a handful of examples [2], but I'll focus on two big things that set Shortwave apart:
(1) An opinionated triage flow. Bundles group together related senders to make your inbox more scannable, while our triage actions (Pin / Snooze / Done) and drag 'n drop allow you to treat your inbox like the to-do list that it is. [3] We lean into the fact that inbox zero is not a realistic goal for many email users.
(2) Team features. We bring Slack-like channels into your email inbox and give you the notification controls to make that possible. [4] Shortwave eliminates the boundary between your team and the rest of the world. And things like emoji reactions, mentions, and a chat-like interface make it feel unlike any email client you've used before.
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/