Superhuman introduces AI-powered categorization to reduce spammy emails in your inbox
It has been more than two years since ChatGPT burst on the scene. Shortly after that, it seemed like almost every email app integrated AI-powered email writing and summaries. Some also introduced AI-powered search for you to sift through your inbox quickly. Superhuman is now using AI to try and tackle one of the primary pain points of emails: categorization.
Google was one of the first companies that focused on putting emails into different brackets with its Inbox email client — but the company shut it down in 2019. Since then, various clients, including Gmail’s native client, have tried to replicate that and with mixed success rates.
Superhuman is now trying to do something similar with its new Auto Label feature, which assigns labels like marketing, pitch, social, and news automatically to emails related to these fields. Moreover, you can write a prompt to create a new label of your own. The email client has focused on getting through your emails as quickly as possible, so you can also auto-archive certain labels if you feel you don’t need to see emails from that category.
“One of the top things we heard from our customers over the last year is that there is an increasing amount of cold emails containing marketing and spam. They asked us why Superhuman is not filtering these emails out? At that time, we were reliant on Gmail and Outlook’s spam filtering, but that wasn’t working out. So we decided to take matters into our own hands for classification with this iteration of labels,” Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra told TechCrunch over a call.
One downside of the auto labels feature at the launch time is that you can’t just edit the prompts for creating categories. That means if you feel that the current prompt is not working well and filtering out some emails that you thought would be automatically categorized, you will have to create a new promopt.
The app gives you the ability to create a Split Inbox based on filters that you have set, such as emails containing certain subjects or emails from a particular domain name. Now, you can also create a new Split Inbox using one of the customers along with existing filters.
Superhuman is enhancing its reminder feature as well. You could already snooze an email to have it surface later. But now, when you reply to certain emails seeking a response from someone, the app automatically surfaces the email after a defined time — you can change that through the settings — if you don’t get a response. With this feature, there is also an AI-powered auto-draft feature that automatically drafts a follow-up in your voice while keeping the context of the conversation and your tone of replies in mind. This is Superhuman’s version of a “gentle nudge” to recipients.
Vohra told TechCrunch that the next step for the company is to integrate different knowledge bases that represent you, such as your website and Wikipedia page. The app already has access to your schedule through your calendar.
Keeping all this context in mind, in the future, Superhuman’s AI can auto-draft replies to emails that need responding and possibly send some replies automatically if you feel comfortable with it. For example, it might reply to someone requesting a meeting with a potential time slot.
Superhuman also aims to build IFTTT-styled (IF This Then That) workflows combined with prompts. For instance, if you receive an email that is about recruiting, you can set a template for a reply through AI prompting and also forward the email to the recruiting department if it meets certain criteria.
While an email client automatically replying to emails is a long way out, categorization is an annoying pain point that could be solved today. And the promised new label feature looks useful — as long as it accurately places emails into different buckets.
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