Inbox is the App Child of Gmail and Google Now
Google’s rethinking of email lets you get information without opening messages
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Today Google is releasing an app called Inbox. If the name evokes an email inbox — something that Google users have been enjoying for years as part of Gmail, one of its most famous products — that’s no accident.
When you use this app, you read and respond to the messages sent to your Gmail address, but you do so without opening the familiar application. Instead, you’re using what Google thinks is the future of mail.
That future just happens to overlap with what is now the company’s flagship product, Google Now. Just as Google Now draws upon your activities on the company’s various tendrils (search, documents, calendar, etc.) to give you vital information on a just-in-time basis, Inbox scours your email to deliver you the good parts, often relieving you of the tedium of plowing through the actual message. Then it highlights those nuggets, sometimes even dipping into the Web to present them with relevant links. If you are inclined to linger over thoughtful missives from your colleagues and friends, Inbox won’t stop you — but clearly it sees your inbox as a launch pad for action, not a contemplative venue. In its effort to resolve the logorrhea of our accumulating mail, its unspoken motto is, “Cut to the chase.”
Inbox got its start around two years ago, when the Gmail team was trying to envision what email would be a decade or so hence, a fairly common sort of prognostication exercise in the Googleplex. “We needed to take a step back,” says Alex Gawley, product director of Gmail and Inbox. “It’s a long time since email was invented. The world has changed a lot — Gmail came out three years before the iPhone came out! We love email, but there are some problems to be solved.”
The biggest problem, of course, is coping with the huge amounts of mail everyone gets. The key is not just getting rid of it, but effectively responding to it.
“Everything we do generates email,” says Gawley. Even the billions of messages on Snapchat, Facebook, SMS and other services haven’t made a dent in the ever-increasing volume. Worse — email, once celebrated as a great time-saver, is work. It’s a beast that needs feeding, a perpetual motion machine that cranks out one demand after another.
“You try to run your life from your inbox, but it’s mostly things other people want you to do, or read, or reply to, or follow up on,” says Gawley (a surprisingly glum assessment from one of Gmail’s leaders). Google’s “user experience researchers” went to people’s houses to view the frustration first-hand and found users overwhelmed. Some of them covered the bottoms and sides of their monitors with stick-it notes reminding them of messages they must deal with. One of them stuck such notes to her phone.
In response to this, the Gmail team came up with a very Googley response: a way to semi-automate the inbox, using natural language understanding and other artificial intelligence voodoo. The team rethought email with with a clean slate — even though all your Gmail information is in the new app, the experience is dramatically different, forged by a relentless desire to get you the key contents of your emails without having to open them. Naturally, it’s optimized for mobile use. (By the way, Inbox is not to be confused with Gmail 5.0, the new version of the classic app expected to be released in the near future. According to leaks, the new Gmail will allow users to merge multiple mail accounts — even non-Google ones — into a single bucket. Inbox is something quite different: an alternative to Gmail.)
Inbox veers from traditional mail programs in a number of ways. Most strikingly, it transforms what was formerly known as “snippets” of mail into a what Google determines is the point of the email. An Inbox feature called Highlights figures out what content inside the messages is most important and displays it in preview form. For instance, if a friend sends you a group of photos (and Google knows which of your contacts are more cherished than others), the photos will appear prominently in preview — so you don’t have to open them. “The same thing for shipping information, for confirmation, for attachments, it’s right there,” says Jason Cornwell, lead designer for Gmail and Inbox. “The idea is to bring the content that matters right up to the top level.”
Inbox’s most impressive tricks are taking content from the mail and translating it into the kind of thing you might want to know right away. Google’s system for generating meaningful notificiations, of course, is Google Now, a product that extracts information from various Google properties and gives you timely information unbidden (like spontaneously urging you to leave early for your doctor’s appointment because traffic is heavy on your usual route). With Inbox, Google boils down emails to the essence to make your inbox a stream of Google Now-ish need-to-know or want-to-see items. (Not surprisingly, Inbox “is based on the same backend as Google Now, the same technology,” says Cornwell.)
For instance, if your travel agent sends you a long message where your flight number is buried deep inside, Inbox will surface that key information and highlight it so you can see it at a glance in your mail feed.
What’s more, Google will augment that information by going onto the web and finding key information that isn’t in the message, like your flight status and gate. Another example is a purchase confirmation – Inbox digs through the message to find the tracking number and will thereafter keep you up to date on its status on a highlight in the inbox.
The other major feature is called Bundles, which adds some steroids to the message categorization process begun in Gmail in recent years. Bundles allows more granular categories (example: receipts) and makes it easier to zip through them more quickly. Users can train Inbox to automatically usher relevant emails into custom pigeonholes. When compressed, a bundle of many emails takes up the space of a single message, making it easier to see the more important emails at a glance.
Another Inbox tool is an improved way to do reminders. When you need something done, you create a reminder that takes its place at the top of the inbox. If you want to put it off, you can “snooze” it to a later time, or even specify that the reminder should reappear at the top when you get to your home or your office or anywhere else. For example, you could create a reminder to get some aspirin and “snooze” the message until you are near a CVS, at which point (assuming you have okayed location tracking on your phone) the reminder will reactivate. Inbox also empowers reminders with a feature called “assist,” which eases the pain of performing the specific tasks. For instance, if you remind yourself to contact a company’s customer service department, Inbox (drawing on Google’s search prowess) will locate the elusive number that might connect you with an actual human being. (No guarantee on this, I assume.)
As of now, Inbox doesn’t do anything to make composing mail more powerful, and that’s too bad; chances are that in many cases Google might have been able to divine context well enough to write a reasonable first draft for many standard replies.
Gawley says that Inbox’s road map includes composition and such. (Maybe in an update called “Outbox”? ) Meanwhile, Inbox does make it easier to choose who to send mail to, as it extracts what it thinks are your favorite contacts and stacks them separately for easy contact.
Google is launching Inbox iOS and Android phones, and on the web on desktop via Chrome. (Versions for tablets and other browsers are in the works.) As with the original Gmail, the release will involve an invite process that allows a gradual rollout while using scarcity to generate demand. The question is how big that demand can grow. The practice of rolling out an innovative alternative to a product via an app has been tried before — notably with Facebook’s Pages. It has the advantage of introducing a radical change to product used by hundreds of millions without upsetting the faithful. But typically, only a fraction of those users leave the mainstay to try an edgy new version. Eventually, some of the features migrate to the main stage.
But the sense that I got from talking to the team leaders is that they believe pretty much everyone should want to use Inbox. “Generally, with those people who feel their inbox is a lot of work, they will get a ton of value by switching wholesale to Inbox,” says Gawley, who clearly views this as the future of email, at least at Google. “This is the start of us thinking about Inbox for the next ten years.”
Watch for that evolution to nudge Inbox even closer to Google Now so that the concept of email itself blurs, as the origin of information becomes less important than how we use it and what it means to us. In the meantime, we can celebrate one aspect of this new product, a wrinkle that will be welcomed by those who have been using its older sibling.
Inbox, at least as of now, has no ads.
