Summarizing must be the low hanging fruit on the GPT-3 api because everybody and their mother wants to summarize everything for me now. Who's going to write me an extension to aggregate and summarize all my summaries?

Hi HN - Shortwave co-founder here. We’ve built a full-featured email client over the last couple of years, just in time for the rise of LLMs. We’ve added quite a few features (and are working on many more) that use LLMs to save you time.

I’m most excited about Smart Summaries — they’ll read and then summarize (even from a different language) long newsletters & those huge threads you just don’t want to wade through.

We’ve got a long way to go, so please do leave us feedback if you have it. Shortwave is much of the early Firebase team, and HN really helped us building that product :) Thanks in advance!

It is a Gmail client, not an email client. The latter is an open standard, which is obviously not supported. That should be mentioned.

Going from 0 to 9 USD / month is steep. Apparently, everyone has Silicon Valley salaries now, for some app.

EDIT: apparently, they changed the title. props for that. :)

Everyone and their mother advertising AI-powered features. I wonder if it's because there's a ton of value to unlock today with AI or is it because that is the only way to get funding / attention these days?

1. Don't use GMail - the US government and a bunch of commercial corporations should not be able to read your email and/or mine it for useful information to manipulate you with.

2. With this kind of frontend, you're just adding more entities which scrutinize your email and your behavior patterns. Oh, and apparently this costs a bunch of money to really use.

3. The appropriate frontend for email services (even GMail) is a FOSS mail client.

Here's a list of many of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_email_clients

I use Thunderbird personally, which is ok-ish and somewhat extensible.

Any potential security issues with giving GPT-3 access to all your emails?

I dont know why Shortwave is pivoting to current AI craze. I have been using it for a while and it's amazing. Only qualm I have with it, and it's the reason I stopped using it for sometime, that when you mark an email 'done' it does not translate to that email marked as 'read' in Gmail.

Before I realized this I was under the impression that my emails are being marked as read too.

Otherwise, shortwave strength is that it's keyboard driven. You can read, delete, label emails all via keyboard.

Email is so important to me and can be better, but I'm tired of closed source tools. Have you given thought of how you could make this open source but still monetize?

Doesn't this just feed your info straight into some company's database?

Is there something like this that does not require you to give them all your data for free?

Is FastMail support via JMAP on the roadmap?

I tried it out, but instantly realized the 'free' version is go restrictive it's useless. I get many startups want to make sure the free version isn't too good, but here the free version is unusable.

Also, $9/mo for a frontend for gmail is just way too much. $108/y ??? If you're going to pay that much, surely you'd just get off gmail entirely. Why pay that much but still give up all your privacy...