- Google DeepMind is building an AI email assistant
- The AI will automatically respond to messages in a user’s own voice and style
- The assistant will sort and organize inboxes to help reduce time spent on admin duties
There are few modern experiences more demoralizing than waking up, picking up your phone to turn off your alarm, and discovering an avalanche of emails burying your inbox in notifications. Forget writing back, just sorting through them all and determining which need responses and how quickly you need to answer can eat up a whole day. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis believes AI should handle all of that organizing and responding, and he and his team have a plan to embed a virtual robot secretary in your inbox so that you never need to crawl through irrelevant sales pitches and unnecessary LinkedIn notifications ever again.
Email is the quintessential magical treasure with a dark curse attached. Miraculous instant communication worldwide is burdened with spam, late-night demands for immediate action from a boss, and the dreaded accidental reply-all button. Hassabis thinks AI can restore the good parts of email by handling all the “mundane chores” and recommending responses instead of leaving you filled with despair at your triple-digit unread count.
Hassabis told the audience at the recent SXSW London event he’d happily pay quite a lot of money to end the current tyranny of the inbox. And not in some far-off future. DeepMind is working to make email inboxes self-managing, capable of sorting through incoming messages, deciding which ones matter, and drafting responses that sound like you. So the next annoying email not only won’t find you well, it won’t find you at all until the AI works up a response for your approval.
From a marketing perspective, it’s a brilliant approach. Plenty of people rightly worried about some of the implications of AI might have a soft spot for the technology if it can clear up even a couple of hours a week for actual productive work (or even seeing your family).
AI email utopia
Hassabis described his vision of a “universal AI assistant” that can be proactive and smart enough to act on your behalf. Instead of regularly giving the AI orders and explaining your priorities, the AI will learn from observing how you deal with a variety of emails and perhaps a one-time broad description of your approach to different kinds of messages. It will know not only how you respond to emails, but also which you ignore on purpose and which you are just stumped at figuring out how to answer.
An AI assistant of that caliber, “gives you more time and maybe protects your attention from other algorithms trying to gain your attention,” Hassabis said. “I think we can actually use AI in service of the individual.” “
That’s the long-term big picture. For now, Hassabis said we can look forward to AI tools that know when to say, “Thanks for the follow-up. I’ll take a look and get back to you soon.” And when to immediately click delete. Everyone would appreciate an AI that gets us to inbox zero without losing our minds.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
