Microsoft may be working on a Bing sidebar that’ll help summarise content on the web page to save time, but for users who only want to get the gist of lengthy email threads, another tool is already out. Shortwave has announced that it’s now utilising the power of GPT-3 to create thread summaries for your Gmail. For the uninitiated, Shortwave is a new email client that aims to offer “smarter & faster email designed for stress-free productivity” by leveraging AI. The average email inbox today is messy due to a slew of emails from several sources and newsletters you may not even remember registering for. Shortwave helps tidy up things, similar to Inbox by Gmail which was shut down in 2020. But the new client now also offers something Inbox never did – email summarisation. Shortwave’s Smart Summaries feature is easy to use. Simply open a mail and hit the sparkly icon atop to get ChatGPT to generate a summary for you. The summary will be displayed in a small but nifty floating window. The feature should be useful for lengthy email threads that would otherwise take too much time to go through. “Smart Summaries give you a TL;DR for each thread that contains just the critical information you need: what it is about, who is involved, and what action needs to be taken. This helps you decide what's worth your time to read in its entirety – and what's not – so you can spend less time sorting through email and more time doing deep work,” reads the company’s press release for the feature. The Summarise function also works with different languages by providing a translated summary. Users get an option to include a summary of a mail before they forward it as well. The press release for Summaries adds: “Let's say you're emailing with a lawyer, doctor, or other subject-matter expert. They may be laying it on thick with industry jargon or simply using large words you're not familiar with. You want someone to “explain it like I'm 5.” Smart Summaries translate ideas into simple English so you can understand quickly and respond confidently.” Since it's a productivity tool, Shortwave includes keyboard shortcuts for many of its functions for quicker navigation. For example, summaries can be generated for emails simply by opening them and hitting the “y” key. Google is currently working on the Bard AI chatbot which is powered by LaMDA. It’s highly likely that the company will be integrating its capabilities in Gmail in time, but for now, Shortwave serves as an early alternative.
