[HN Gopher] Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail
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Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail
Author : jamest
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-02-27 21:15 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.shortwave.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.shortwave.com)
| cardosof wrote:
| 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?
| Aeolun wrote:
| 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.
| frognumber wrote:
| At least in my line of work:
|
| * 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.
| wstuartcl wrote:
| I think is a mix, there are probably a lot of areas where it
| does provide value and it's getting to a point where training
| or tuning existing models is low hanging fruit for those
| areas. There is for sure another whole section of this that
| is "second life" like for marketing teams -- where they want
| to market something in the AI space to try to ride the wave.
| I fear a lot of the executions coming right now are "just do
| something with AI".
| yenda wrote:
| Both
| adventured wrote:
| 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.
| ehsankia wrote:
| 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.
| jwngr wrote:
| 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/
| htrp wrote:
| ^^ 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?
| breck wrote:
| 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?
| peon2345 wrote:
| Is there something like this that does not require you to give
| them all your data for free?
| ghqst wrote:
| Yes, I'm sure Google will eventually have the same thing, and
| you've already given THEM all your data for free.
| steponlego wrote:
| Doesn't this just feed your info straight into some company's
| database?
| jwngr wrote:
| 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:
| https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5722486-how-your-data-is...
| steponlego wrote:
| So, yes?
| rockwotj wrote:
| It's an opt-in feature, so it's only for the emails you
| request to be summarized.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| fatfox wrote:
| Any potential security issues with giving GPT-3 access to all
| your emails?
| sneak wrote:
| Yes, OpenAI can log and read them forever (even if they don't
| use them to train additional models). This is probably an NDA
| violation.
| jwngr wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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/
| frognumber wrote:
| Have you considered working through Azure's APIs instead?
| It's like OpenAI, but with more guarantees of privacy /
| security.
| awill wrote:
| 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...
| jwngr wrote:
| 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/).
| barbazoo wrote:
| 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.
| richardw wrote:
| 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
| jwngr wrote:
| 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?
| latexr wrote:
| > Despite adding some AI features
|
| 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.
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
| jwngr wrote:
| 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!
| skilled wrote:
| 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?
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| Aeolun wrote:
| I think the client took a few years, and they've now quickly
| added some AI related features.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| 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.
| Aeolun wrote:
| This works only with Gmail, so the people using already
| agreed to have someone rifle through their mails.
|
| What is one more?
| smusamashah wrote:
| 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.
| jwngr wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.shortwave.com/blog/ai-email-summaries/
| felixg3 wrote:
| Why are you calling it an email client? It is obviously not. It
| is a proprietary front-end for Gmail, which is not even
| remotely the same.
| baxtr wrote:
| 80% of all emails are gmail? So yeah technically you're right
| but actually they are.
| [deleted]
| libraryatnight wrote:
| 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?
| stirfish wrote:
| I used to use Nutshell, but it went out of business because its
| name was too long.
|
| https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/05/irtnog_by_...
| precompute wrote:
| I'll do it for 100k and the title "prompt artisan"
| 9dev wrote:
| This is SO going to become a thing on LinkedIn.
| felixg3 wrote:
| It is a Gmail client, not an email client. The latter is an open
| standard, which is obviously not supported. That should be
| mentioned.
|
| 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. :)
| einpoklum wrote:
| 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.
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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