Summarizing must be the low hanging fruit on the GPT-3 api because everybody and their mother wants to summarize everything for me now. Who's going to write me an extension to aggregate and summarize all my summaries?
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.
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 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.
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?
I’m a big fan of using Shortwave as-is (ie with Gmail), but I agree it would be great it they added generic IMAP support. Being tied to GMail is a bit unfortunate.
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot of value to be unlocked over this decade and not very many people know where that value is at (so most will flail around trying to find something useful). There will be a massive amount of throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.
Yes, they are solving a problem (make it simple and faster, save time, etc) for the end user. For a subset of products, they are just jumping on the bandwagon first and deciding what do do next. The value is real and once in a generation.
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) is a FOSS mail client.
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.
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.
I dont know why Shortwave is pivoting to current AI craze. I have been using it for a while and it's amazing. Only qualm I have with it, and it's the reason I stopped using it for sometime, that when you mark an email 'done' it does not translate to that email marked as 'read' in Gmail.
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.
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?
Email is so important to me and can be better, but I'm tired of closed source tools. Have you given thought of how you could make this open source but still monetize?
Just wait it out, Google will either build something like it or buy Shortwave.
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.
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/).
I think the measure of this would be "would this make me more than $9 a month more efficient" and "is there any alternative that is a better cost/benefit", i.e. a free tool that is mostly as good. For you it might be useless, for someone who lives on gmail and charges per hour, it's probably an instant win.
I bet there are lots of people that "live" inside their email client all day long. Saving them time and effort will pay off quickly, $108/year is nothing even if it just saves you 30 minutes every day.
libraryatnight|3 years ago
precompute|3 years ago
stirfish|3 years ago
https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/05/irtnog_by_...
jwngr|3 years ago
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!
light_hue_1|3 years ago
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.
smusamashah|3 years ago
felixg3|3 years ago
emptysongglass|3 years ago
joshspankit|3 years ago
skilled|3 years ago
felixg3|3 years ago
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. :)
warning26|3 years ago
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.
cardosof|3 years ago
jwngr|3 years ago
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/
ehsankia|3 years ago
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.
frognumber|3 years ago
* 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.
adventured|3 years ago
bg24|3 years ago
Aeolun|3 years ago
It sounds like the perfect storm to me.
yenda|3 years ago
einpoklum|3 years ago
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.
warkdarrior|3 years ago
fatfox|3 years ago
jwngr|3 years ago
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/
sneak|3 years ago
smusamashah|3 years ago
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.
jwngr|3 years ago
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?
breck|3 years ago
steponlego|3 years ago
jwngr|3 years ago
peon2345|3 years ago
ElijahLynn|3 years ago
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.
ghqst|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo|3 years ago
awill|3 years ago
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...
jwngr|3 years ago
richardw|3 years ago
barbazoo|3 years ago