Shortwave: A GPT-3-powered front end for Gmail

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.<p>I’m most excited about Smart Summaries — they’ll read and then summarize (even from a different language) long newsletters &amp; those huge threads you just don’t want to wade through.<p>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!

It is a Gmail client, not an email client. The latter is an open standard, which is obviously not supported. That should be mentioned.<p>Going from 0 to 9 USD &#x2F; month is steep. Apparently, everyone has Silicon Valley salaries now, for some app.<p>EDIT: apparently, they changed the title. props for that. :)

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it&#x27;s because there&#x27;s a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding &#x2F; attention these days?

1. Don&#x27;t use GMail - the US government and a bunch of commercial corporations should not be able to read your email and&#x2F;or mine it for useful information to manipulate you with.<p>2. With this kind of frontend, you&#x27;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.<p>3. The appropriate frontend for email services (even GMail) is a FOSS mail client.<p>Here&#x27;s a list of many of them: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_email_clients" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comparison_of_email_clients</a><p>I use Thunderbird personally, which is ok-ish and somewhat extensible.

Any potential security issues with giving GPT-3 access to all your emails?

I dont know why Shortwave is pivoting to current AI craze. I have been using it for a while and it&#x27;s amazing. Only qualm I have with it, and it&#x27;s the reason I stopped using it for sometime, that when you mark an email &#x27;done&#x27; it does not translate to that email marked as &#x27;read&#x27; in Gmail.<p>Before I realized this I was under the impression that my emails are being marked as read too.<p>Otherwise, shortwave strength is that it&#x27;s keyboard driven. You can read, delete, label emails all via keyboard.

Email is so important to me and can be better, but I&#x27;m tired of closed source tools. Have you given thought of how you could make this open source but still monetize?

Doesn&#x27;t this just feed your info straight into some company&#x27;s database?

Is there something like this that does not require you to give them all your data for free?

Is FastMail support via JMAP on the roadmap?

I tried it out, but instantly realized the &#x27;free&#x27; version is go restrictive it&#x27;s useless. I get many startups want to make sure the free version isn&#x27;t too good, but here the free version is unusable.<p>Also, $9&#x2F;mo for a frontend for gmail is just way too much. $108&#x2F;y ??? If you&#x27;re going to pay that much, surely you&#x27;d just get off gmail entirely. Why pay that much but still give up all your privacy...