Generative AI has the potential to upend the way many people work and live, and almost every company wants a piece of the cake and see how AI tools can enhance the products they offer. The same is true for Shortwave, an alternative email client built on top ofGmail, emulating the interface Google built with Inbox that many people still miss to this day. The company steadily introduced new AI features over the past few months and is has been launching an avalanche of new AI features this week. The most relevant change for Android users is the addition of Shortwave’s AI assistant to the mobile app.
Asthe company announced on its blog today, the Shortwave AI Assistant is now available on Android devices. It’s accessible via a new button in the bottom right in the form of the Shortwave logo, sitting there along with the other items in the bottom bar. Pulling it up opens an interface all-too-familiar from ChatGPT and Google Bard, with a chatbox at the bottom that lets you send prompts. Since the custom AI has access to your emails, it can be used to draft emails in your tone, search for specific information in your email history, show your calendar schedule, and answer any questions you may have about using Shortwave.
The AI Assistant isn’t a completely new addition to Shortwave — it’s been available on the web for a while now. Making it accessible in the Android app (and the iOS app a day earlier) makes a lot of sense, though. When screen real estate is limited, it may be either to ask AI for summaries and key information rather than trying to dig through all relevant emails yourself.
The AI Assistant is available in the free version of Shortwave, but to take better advantage of it with the option to help you dig through up to a year of email history, you need the $7/month Personal plan. If you want the Assistant to write in your personal style, you even need to get the $14/month Pro plan.
AI summaries
AI translation
AI research
AI scheduling
AI compose
AI proofread
AI-assisted search
1 year history
3 years history
5 years history
Ghostwriter personalization
AI autocomplete
customizable prompts
Shortwave also introduced an AI-powered autocomplete option on the web
Another interesting feature the company launched this week is AI autocomplete, which is available as part of the Pro plan. It’s currently only on the web or when you use a keyboard with your Android device, with Shortwave telling us that it’s still working out the touchscreen UX for autocomplete.
When autocomplete guesses right, it can save quite some time, but in this case, this is not where I wanted to go
In my preliminary testing over the past few days, the autocomplete AI tool seems a lot more capable than Gmail and Google Docs’ autocomplete options, though it can be a little too creative and wordy. Rather than only suggesting a handful of very likely next words like in Gmail, Shortwave’s autocomplete is capable of finishing full sentences and coming up with new paragraphs on the fly.
Given that this requires more guesswork, it feels less accurate in many situations, but when it does hit the right tones, it blows Gmail out of the water. Like with most AI tools, the feature is prone to not always giving you the right facts (I had two instances of incorrect scheduling), so you need to be careful not to just autocomplete everything and take it at face value.
Can you trust AI, Shortwave or not?
In a sense, Shortwave is a few steps ahead of Google when it comes to integrating AI into your workflow. Rather than relying on a different tool for AI queries, like you may do with Bard and its Google Workspace extension, all email tools you need are collated right inside Shortwave, on top of the already excellent inbox organization options.
However, there is also a question of trust, which is a problem for all AI tools which could potentially use your data to further train the models. Shortwave works with OpenAI to provide its AI features and refers to the other company’s privacy policy and terms of services. In itssecurity guide, Shortwave says that “when you interact with these features, we share your email content with OpenAI, but only to provide you with the requested feature.” The company makes clear that “your data is not used to train OpenAI’s model or any other machine learning models.”
Google, on the other hand, says that for its AI features it “uses Workspace Labs Data and metrics to provide, improve, and develop products, services, and machine learning technologies across Google,” with the possibility that some employees may see and interact with your prompts and the output.
Shortwave has two more days of AI announcements ahead of it, with more announcements following on Thursday and Friday.
