Despite wave after wave of startups vowing to kill email, electronic mail has never been stronger. It seems the best way to live with emails is to let AI steal the job of writing them.
EasyEmail, emerging from Y Combinator’s latest batch, is aiming to get inside your inbox and help you navigate future messages using the past as a guide with an autocomplete-like feature.
After downloading the Chrome plugin, the service spends 10-20 minutes pouring through your sent messages and building up a good idea of how you write emails. From there, the service lounges in your “compose message” window bringing the insights of autocomplete to the body of your message. The interface can get a little crowded and the utility takes some effort curating responses early on which you can actively delete from future suggestions.
Compared to the predictive text features on your phone which may complete a word or two, EasyEmail is ambitiously trying to complete your sentences based on how you usually complete your sentences in emails.
Your mileage with the plugin will depend strongly on what you use it for. In its earliest iteration the app seems most useful to those trapped in sending a lot of monotonous messages. If you’re working in something like sales or PR where you’re making the same pitch over and over again and dealing with a lot of the same questions, I can imagine the time saved is a lot more palpable. For me, the plugin was surfacing a lot of nonsense for the sake of quantity over quality, clearly communicating that there’s still a long way to go in improving the plugin’s smarts.
What may be more useful to a broader base of users is how the plugin lets users define hotkeys and bring up oft copy-pasted bio info or links into the body of their emails without the pain of searching for the info over and over again.
Co-founder Filip Twarowski tells TechCrunch that the next step here is finding how you respond to certain people and catering responses so that suggestions are more casual with acquaintances and more formal with people that might be managers or work associates.
EasyEmail has a great deal of promise as a tool and is clearly tackling some big challenges. Depending on how you use it, the plugin is a lightweight add-on that could save you a load of time navigating the minutiae of sending tons of emails.
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