How AI Instantly Gets What I Need From My Inbox
How today's AI can be used to find the needle in your inbox haystack.
I have too many emails in my Inbox. I’m not alone. The average user receives over 100 emails every day, or 40,000 annually. Even if we could block every spam (85%) perfectly, it still leaves us with 6 to 7 thousand new messages to manage every year — that’s per email account. Like me, you probably have a few email accounts accumulated over the years. Searching my inboxes is time-consuming. I need to come up with the correct search query and then, typically, dive into the resulting list of messages in the hopes of finding what I am looking for — whether in the message itself or attachments. Unfortunately, there is often a lot of both to sift through. It is a laborious process that requires time and concentration. It would be awesome if I could simply summon a virtual assistant to get me the information I need without having to dive into the information overload that is my email inbox.
Great news! With the advent of LLM AI like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, we now have a technology that can understand human communication, including Email. Here at mxHERO Labs, we’ve been testing powerful LLMs with Email. We are excited to share the results of our tests and how you, too, can experience firsthand how AI can transform your email experience.
AI can search through emails efficiently. More importantly, the search is done with natural language; there is no need to know a particular query language. In this article, we will focus on AI’s ability to perform a “deep search,” not only finding the correct email but also “reading” the email and its attachments and getting you the exact answer. In other words, AI can find the “needle in the [email] haystack” for you!
AI can find the “needle in the [email] haystack”
To demonstrate the utility of AI for your inbox search, I’ll look for the value of an electricity bill. This is my question to ChatGPT.
What is the total of my latest electricity bill?
The following video shows the results using both ChatGPT (with the Chat for Email app) and Google Gemini Advanced.
The video reveals three key points.
AI delivers
AI allows us to extract exact bits of information from our Inbox. Wow! In our tests with Chat for Email, we usually get precisely what we are looking for or a very close approximation. This is game-changing. Our inbox, that clutter of personal history, is no longer information impossibly buried in a mountain of junk. AI is the inbox extraction machine we had always hoped for. One could only imagine all the other valuable queries like:
- Get me my flight locator for my trip to Spain.
- How much is the bill for the online course?
- When is my Amazon purchase arriving?
You get the idea; essentially, why even look at your Inbox anymore? Just ask AI. (More on this in a forthcoming article!)
Chat for Email performs
It is interesting to see how Chat for Email (a ChatGPT app) outperforms Google’s Gemini Advanced for a Gmail search. You’d think that one Google product would have the best integration with another. Our best guess is that Gemini is simply doing a standard Gmail search under the hood and parsing the results. Chat for Email, by contrast, is a full RAG AI solution with emails continuously optimized for AI search.
Powerful AI isn’t sufficient for getting the best results. Just as important is how the data is prepared and accessed.
This highlights a very important point. Having powerful AI isn't sufficient for getting the best results. Just as important is how the data is prepared and accessed. We're excited to integrate Gemini with Chat for Email and will share the results.
AI is finicky
In the video, we ask Gemini the same query twice and get completely different responses. This type of behavior is as true for ChatGPT as it is for Gemini. AI is finicky, and sometimes you just need to “shake it” a bit to get it to respond. :)
What’s coming next
AI is evolving rapidly, crazy fast. Context windows are getting orders of magnitude larger, allowing AI to analyze more content at once. For our bulging inboxes, this is enabling. Models are getting smarter, and prices are coming down. Your email experience is changing and will soon be unrecognizable from what it is today. We’ll talk about that in the next article. More to follow!
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