How to use AI to get better at email

Artificial intelligence is revolutionising email. Historically, email has posed many challenges. Deciphering the correct tone of voice, managing threads, and finding that all-important email have always been frustrating tasks. Coupled with a seemingly infinite unread count, email can be quite overwhelming.

This article delves into how AI is enhancing our email experience, emphasising efficiency, improved email composition, and a more user-friendly inbox.

Leveraging AI for better emails

Email apps have integrated AI functionalities for a while, like spam filters and phishing detection. However, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has radically enhanced the way we interact with our inboxes:

• Efficiency and time-saving: Beyond categorising, AI can manage your inbox based on personalised preferences, like auto-scheduling and deleting unwanted mail. Add smart features like text auto-complete and you've got significant time-saving.

• Enhanced writing: With AI, you get recommendations for phrasing, grammar checks, and clarity ensuring polished emails.

• Insights and reduced errors: Use AI to gain insights into your email patterns and mitigate human errors in scheduling or follow-ups.

• Accessibility: AI-enhanced voice-to-text and text-to-voice features ensure quicker and more inclusive communication.

Whether you’re a CEO, employee or busy parent, AI can reconfigure your email experience. CEOs can auto-reply, prepare for meetings, and set actionable tasks post-meetings. Employees can benefit from AI categorisation and assistance in writing consistent, brand-aligned emails. Even parents can manage playdate emails, with AI ensuring uninterrupted family time by controlling email delivery.

Enter Shortwave.

Shortwave: Your AI-enhanced email assistant

Shortwave is more than an email app. It's a system that morphs your inbox into an organised, actionable to-do list—and gives you a ChatGPT-like assistant you can talk to in a sidebar while you work through emails.

But what makes Shortwave really special in the crowded AI email app market? Unique to the Shortwave email app is its server-side component. Users’ email is synced to Shortwave’s servers, where they have a hefty cluster of GPUs. This lets them support AI features that require a lot of processing, like embedding emails or running x-encoding models during searches—features that would be impractical in a client-only app.

In a nutshell, Shortwave improves:

• Organisation: Efficiently sort and prioritise your inbox.

• Productivity: Transform your email into an actionable to-do list.

• Writing assistance: Generate AI-powered drafts without compromising your unique style.

Shortwave features that help you get better at email

• Find answers from your email history: Ask questions and get quick answers based on your email history, without needing to remember specific keywords to use. The answers also link to the relevant emails so you can verify accuracy.

• Prioritise your emails: Easily reorder threads using drag and drop, and annotate for clarity.

• Read emails in seconds: Use AI to condense emails into concise summaries.

• Write better, faster: Maintain your unique style while getting AI suggestions.

• Schedule with ease: Simplify meeting scheduling with AI-generated emails.

• Group emails: Bundle related emails for a streamlined inbox.

• Custom email delivery: Control email interruptions with tailored delivery schedules.

• Pin & snooze: Highlight important threads and set reminders for others.

Shortwave's roadmap includes features like detailed inbox summaries and natural language-based email filters.

How does it work?

Shortwave uses AI in an innovative way—to find the most relevant data to answer questions, not just for text generation.

It contains advanced algorithms that analyse queries to determine what data sources would be useful to formulate a response, like emails, calendar events, settings, etc. A key tool is the AI search which scans your entire email history looking for matches. It extracts features from the request, searches using vector embeddings across emails, and ranks results from thousands of potential matches using AI models running on their GPUs, to produce data-driven answers, all in ~3 seconds.

Other specialised tools handle calendar lookups, drafting emails in your tone, and docs search. All this context is assembled into a detailed prompt to feed to the LLM to generate a tailored response. The output is post-processed to add links, highlights, and formatting. This context-driven, data-focused approach makes Shortwave seem more capable and intelligent than solutions that just pass questions directly to a general LLM.

If AI-enhanced email management intrigues you, Ben’s Bites readers get an exclusive 3 months of Shortwave free with the code BENSBITES3MONTHS. Share your experience with us!

This article was created in collaboration with Ben’s Bites and Shortwave.