Your email service can be smarter!..
This post is for you, if you have a "category" of friends you stay in touch with via email only and don't message very often. Along the years left behind, you continue to get occasional updates from them. However, as a result of intermittent communication, you may later find it difficult to recall their status and certain past events.
Suppose you're writing an email after a long time—maybe to ask something or just to say hi—but you realize you don’t remember a critical detail about them:
- His father was ill. Did he recover? Or did he pass?
- Did they move? Which city or state was it?
- What was their oldest child's name? Was it a girl?!
- What was the last position she was promoted to?
- What was the previous country he worked in?
So, you search for their email address and start digging into past messages. Right? (This happens to me quite often! 😅) Those of you who've encountered this, raise your hand! ✋✋✋😅
Wouldn't it be amazing if your email interface could provide that information in just a couple of seconds?!
😉
A new feature:
"Auto-summary"
Imagine a button that opens a pop-up window or side pane to display a summary of a particular contact. For convenience, a "Show summary" button could automatically appear when there’s only one recipient in the "To" section. If there are multiple recipients, a pop-up could allow you to select the specific contact you'd like summarized. Once triggered, the "machine" scans all past emails from that contact to generate a concise summary of important information.
What counts as "important"? This could include significant life changes, personal or family-related details, or other notable updates shared in your communication history.
Additionally:
"Smart answers"
Alternatively, or additionally, while composing an email, you could ask specific questions about a given contact. A pop-up or side pane could provide instant answers based on your communication history with that person. You could ask questions like:
- "Which countries has he been to recently?"
- "How old is their youngest daughter now?" (or, "When was she born?")
This feature would make it easy to retrieve relevant details quickly, saving time and ensuring your message is personalized and accurate.
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| Thanks to ChatGPT and Gemini for this illustration |
Things to Consider
For the best result, the "merge contacts" functionality should have been performed to ensure contacts with multiple email accounts are properly processed.
Do you have a suggestion? Please contribute to this post by leaving a comment below.
Call to Action
We invite leading email service providers (like Gmail and Yahoo) to incorporate the capabilities of AI-based technologies to enable the features described above.
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The only problem i see with it is slightly dehumanizing interpersonal relationships. Did the person actually remember my birthday, or did they just look it up to impress me...that sort of thing. On the flip side, someone forgot my name and someone else didn't, so I might think less of the one who forgot, but maybe the other person forgot too, they just had AI help them. It's all part of the strange world we live in, so we gotta role with it, right?
ReplyDeleteKeep up the good work!
Great point! Thank you for sharing your opinion, and for the brainstorming. In fact, I have considered a similar point of view. I even added a heading "Objection" when composing the post, but later canceled/postponed it. Your timely comment triggers a discussion here.
DeleteI can think of a few factors. Here's my dialectic: 😉
- The detail in question... is it a personal one, like a family situation, or a business-related one? Am I writing to a friend or relative, or to someone about business? These two should be treated differently, I guess.
- If the detail is personal or family-related, and if I don't remember that, does it mean I don't think of my beloved ones enough (and maybe I don't pray for them)? In this case, the AI-assisted part of my message would just be a demonstration of kindness, lacking sincerity.
- On the other hand, one way or another, trying to recall some past detail and the effort to find it out, in order to ask about it in the next message, is still something, and should deserve being respected.
- The multi-channel and fast-consuming nature of the modern life bombards our minds with crazy levels of inputs, likely weakening our memories. This fact should make it acceptable to get assistance from AI for our messages.
Thank you for joining me in this brainstorm!