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My problem with this is that it contributes to the broken culture of email. – Wanna go for coffee? – January is busy. After? is a completely fine exchange. A
by gajus 4y ago
My problem with this is that it contributes to the broken culture of email.
– Wanna go for coffee?
– January is busy. After?
is a completely fine exchange. Adding a wall of text to convey the same information does not help anyone.
- Waterluvian 4y agoThere’s still the ability to just type out half a sentence. Digging a bit deeper, is your concern that “if there’s a tool, people will use it”? Aside: I think this creates a delightful opportunity for an unnecessary middleman. Let’s make “Summarizely” a SaaS app to summarize long winded emails!
- TeMPOraL 4y ago> Digging a bit deeper, is your concern that “if there’s a tool, people will use it”? That is a big part of what software industry does to society, isn't it? If there's a tool, people will use it, and when enough people use it, it becomes expected or even required to use it. I expanded on that phenomenon a bit in a different HN thread today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155487.
- monkeydust 4y ago100%, it just contributes to the digital landfill that is our inboxes. Good emails should be written like pseudo code, I suspect this will happen or emails will finally die for something that provides this type of capability of exchanging information in order to facilitate decision making.
- gajus 4y agoPersonally, I switched to voice messages (via WhatsApp or Slack). It doesn't work for everything, but... if I know this will take me more than a minute to type, it is going to be a voice message. If it requires visual aid – Loom. The only problem with audio/Loom messages is that it is not easily indexable, but that's a tooling problem that can be easily solved. I rarely use email (I may ask someone to compose an email for me). In this setup, I do see value if I had a Slack bot that I could say to "ask lawyers for an update on X". But even then, people would immediately know that the email came not from "me"... Personally, I'd like to see more tooling around * using AI to auto-polish video/audio communication, e.g. remove long pauses, skip filler words, etc. * summarizing video/audio/text communication into bullet points of intel and actions
- gajus 4y agoI think the future of work communication is going to be something similar to what these guys are doing https://www.volleyapp.com/ https://www.volleyapp.com/ I don't Volley is there yet (or even close), but the concept is on the right path: async video/audio/3D stitched into a coherent narrative thanks to AI. Input and high quality audio is the biggest barrier at the moment. When I say input, I mean that we need something similar to sousveillance tech that can contribute to conversation without me actively switching context. Just like we would in a real-world conversation. When I say audio, I mean that no one wants to listen poorly articulated voice messages that are hard to follow. We need tech that can make each of us sound smart. It will happen. Few interesting startups in this space.
- marssaxman 4y ago> if I know this will take me more than a minute to type, it is going to be a voice message. I'm glad you and I do not try to correspond!
- polygamous_bat 4y agoSame here. Audio messages are easy to create for the sender but a nightmare to parse for the receiver. Whenever I receive an audio message I automatically tend to assume that the sender thinks of their time as more valuable than the receiver, which is acceptable in some cases (from busy PhD advisor to advisee) but I find unacceptable in other cases, for example in peer-to-peer communication.
- gajus 4y agoThat view that you are describing is completely culture dependent though. The opposite is true in Asia.
- marssaxman 4y agoI've never heard of that before. Could you describe how it works?
- monkeydust 4y agoAnyone remember google wave (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Wave) - I remember playing around with it with a few friends thinking there is definatley something in it.
- gajus 4y agoAt the time, Wave felt revolutionary. Real shame it never got broader adoption.
- fragmede 4y agoWhat's a shame is that that they gave up on it. There was clearly a need for new tool in that space. Though, these days where we're at is a shared Google doc with commenting.
- rad_gruchalski 4y agoIt’s been handed over to ASF: https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html https://incubator.apache.org/projects/wave.html. Retired by now but specs and sources are still online.
- vidarh 4y agoIn the 90's the notion of autonomous agents negotiating to fullfil our goals were for a brief period all the rage. Being able to tell an AI what you want and have it translated to actual goals for agents to use to negotiate, and have the result of their search translated back to concise plain text would be great.
- Ken_At_EM 4y agoYou’re right. Secondary point, if you can’t make time to have coffee for someone for an entire month, it probably isn’t important enough to do, ever.
- gajus 4y agoThat's just not true. You shouldn't take offense to this at all. People have busy schedules.
- duxup 4y agoI don’t think it is offensive. I think it is that “next month” is probably an indication of importance and “next month” will be busy too / the importance of a message you want an AI to spam back… still not important.
- gajus 4y agoAlso, "coffee" is like the most generic thing someone could ask for. The more generic the ask, the harder to schedule.
- Ken_At_EM 4y agoAlmost no one has too busy of a schedule to not squeeze in a 30-60 minute conversation over coffee within a month. If I ask someone to coffee and their response is, next month? I’d take it as a clear signal that the content of our conversation or our relationship is not important.
- channel_t 4y agoYeah I'm excited about the possibilities of AI as the next HN-er, but this thing is dystopian as hell IMHO.
- deegles 4y agodystopian would be if the receiving party is also using a LLM to summarize their emails.
- version_five 4y agoIronically, based on my experience working in consulting and with exec level folks, what most people need is something that turns long meandering emails into text like your example Good emails are short and give only the most relevant info and "ask" of the recipient. Most emails people send get ignored or misunderstood because they expect too much from the recipient, who, unless it's a major priority, doesn't have the time to try and figure out what they're supposed to do from the email. I expect this kind of thing will never get traction in most business applications, but an email shortener, definitely.
- gajus 4y agoyup. I am just not going to read your long email. As a rule of thumb, 90% of emails essence is contained in the second from last sentence in the email (usually an ask; don't believe me, just check your inbox). If it is a long email, that's the only part I am going to read.
- Chris2048 4y agoI believe this can be done with NN softwares: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/democratize-documentation-summarization-with-hugging-face-on-amazon-sagemaker/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/democratize-documentation...
- jancsika 4y agoIt is true that there is a risk of AI adding creating content that is unnecessarily verbose. This could end up consuming time and putting a higher cognitive load on the humans who ultimately read these emails. On the other hand, these AI systems will only advance over time. It's certainly within the realm of possibility that these systems will be able to write with increased brevity. Additionally, much like current recommendation algorithms, they will likely adapt to specific needs and styles of a given user. Whatever the case, we can expect many changes to the way we communicate in the coming years. You might even say it's a brave new world!
- ryanSrich 4y ago> is a completely fine exchange. Adding a wall of text to convey the same information does not help anyone. Should have been a text or telegram message anyway.
- frereubu 4y agoI'm old enough to remember when tech folk would tut when someone had a long plaintext signature because it took up bandwidth...
- gajus 4y agoDon't think I remember that. No one counted bytes when sending messages. In what context would it have mattered?
- stonogo 4y agoIt wasn't about bandwidth, but long signatures were obnoxious beacuse you had to see them multiple times per day. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/McQuary_limit https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/McQuary_limit People whined about bandwidth waste in this category of complaints but I think it wasn't a real problem, just another aspect of an already-disliked long-signature practice: https://books.google.com/books?id=qoc5DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=qoc5DQAAQBAJ&pg=PA97#v=one...
- gajus 4y agoLearned something new. Thanks
- frereubu 4y agoIt was on the NTK email list (UK-based tech newsletter) in the late 90s / early 2000s - http://www.ntk.net/ http://www.ntk.net/ - when people had limited bandwidth on their dial-up connections. Possibly more of a principle along the lines of "save the pennies and the pounds look after themselves" but I remember it clearly.
- fancymcpoopoo 4y agoYou can’t find any time in a while month to get a coffee… that’s not fine at all
- kkyangyang 4y agowhat are your thoughts on x.ai from years ago
- gajus 4y agoApart from the fact that it wasn't AI, but a human labor performing tasks pretending to be AI, it was a great service.