I’ll admit it: Sometimes a mean or pushy email can ruin my whole morning, especially if it’s the very first thing I see.
It seems like JeanCarl Bisson (a technical evangelist for IBM) and Adarsh Uppula (co-founder at hiring startup Gogohire) have had this problem, too. That’s why they built a service called Good Email Club at this weekend’s TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon.
Bisson and Uppula integrated the service with Microsoft Outlook and IBM Watson — Good Email Club uses Watson to analyze the sentiment of your Outlook emails. It then identifies the positive emails and creates a list for reading via text-to-speech.
In other words, imagine starting your day off right by listening to the best messages in your inbox as you drive to work. I suppose you’ll still know that there are probably less pleasant emails waiting for you, but Uppula said they’ll hold less sway because you started positively.
And while this was built for Outlook accounts, Bisson said this could potentially work with any email provider.
For that to happen, Bisson and Uppula would have to keep working on the project. They said they’re open to the possibility, or at least to trying Good Email Club out for themselves — though the commercial prospects might be limited.
“I’m not sure how many people would be paying for it,” Uppula said.
This isn’t the pair’s first project, either. They actually met through hackathons, and Bisson estimated that he’s been to more than 100 of them. Bisson admitted that boiling down 24 hours of work into a one-minute pitch can be tough, but he added, “We always walk away with something and try to learn something new.”