Copilot for Email

How Shortwave Smart Summaries turbocharge my email experience

Transformers now transforming inboxes 😀

Guru Chahal
Lightspeed Venture Partners
3 min readFeb 27, 2023

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No matter what your role, there’s one universal truth in our lives — too much email! Too many things in our inbox that we need to read, catch up on, respond to, file away, and not nearly enough time to give all of them the attention they deserve.

The consequence — important emails often go unanswered. Things we set aside to read later (when we “have more time”) never get read. Information that could help us do our job better slips by unnoticed. Stress levels go up while your productivity goes down!

And now, Shortwave, my favorite email client, has taken on this challenge 💪. Today, Shortwave launched Smart Summaries, which uses the power of AI and large language models to highlight the key points of every message in your inbox.

Everyone’s had the experience of having to comb through an endless email thread to extract useful information buried somewhere deep inside — especially when you’re late to the conversation. Smart Summaries does that for you automatically.

Shortwave generates AI Summaries for your email threads

It can also scan the many newsletters landing in your inbox and quickly give you the key bullet points.

Summarize your newsletters with Shortwave

You can even forward these summaries to other people who don’t use Shortwave (yet)!

Forward with Summaries from Shortwave

Or perhaps you get emails once in a while that need translation — Shortwave’s got your back (this is so magical 😀)!

Translate your emails with Shortwave

The concept driving Smart Summaries is the ability to do more while reading less. It makes email less of a burden and more of a boon. And if, like me, you subscribe to the ethos of Zero Inbox, Smart Summaries gets you there much faster.

Checking my inbox now actually brings me joy 🥲 (those are my tears of happiness after coming back from a vacation and powering through 100s of emails with Shortwave)

Email has long been ripe for disruption. And while many have tried over the years, Shortwave is one of the very few that actually makes it easier and more useful. Since it became available last year, it’s been powering professionals at world’s leading companies such as Asana, Foursquare, Indeed, Twilio, and Twitter. Once you try it, I guarantee you’ll never go back to using email the old way.

Smart Summaries is just one application where AI and large language models will transform email. You can imagine some of the others: smarter autocompletes, drafting quick responses, automatic categorization and prioritization — virtually anywhere a machine can process language faster and more efficiently than humans.

Generative AI is truly a transformative technology that will impact how we interact with all forms of software. With nearly 4 billion active users worldwide, email may be where we experience the most dramatic impact of this amazing tech!

Wanna see the impact on your relationship with email — head over to Shortwave.com and try it out for yourself!

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Guru Chahal
Lightspeed Venture Partners

Enterprise Partner @LightspeedVP , Founder, Product Exec. Focus: Automation, Cloud, Security, Infra, DevOps, Observability. https://linkedin.com/in/guruchahal