This new 2023 guide will show you everything you need to know about AI Email Assistants. First, I’ll show you how AI Email Assistants work and then how they can give massive productivity gains to knowledge workers. Sounds good? Let’s dive right in…
What are AI Email Assistants?
AI email assistants are artificial intelligence (AI) driven software that helps people write emails. Specifically, they are designed to help people write emails faster with improved spelling, grammar, style and clarity.
Why are AI Email Assistants Important?
Knowledge workers have reported saving up to 30 minutes a day writing and replying to emails using AI email assistants. That’s over 10 hours a month! In financial terms, using AI tools could make businesses billions of dollars per year, as employees use their time on more productive activities.
Who benefits from AI Email Assistants?
Anyone who uses email frequently to communicate with others could benefit. Knowledge workers include executives (business owners, managers etc.) professional services (lawyers, consultants, accountants, engineers etc.), revenue teams (sales, marketing, PR, customer success, customer support etc.), medical professionals (doctors, nurses etc.) educators (teachers, professors), administrators and many more professionals.
How do AI Email Assistants work?
AI Email Assistants are based on a type of computer program called a Large Language Model (LLM). This is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) model that is trained on vast amounts of text data, designed to understand and generate human-like language. LLMs are used on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as language translation, summarization, question answering, and text generation. AI Email Assistants use text generation. From mapping and understanding the relationship between different words, the computer program can predict the next word in a sentence given an input like “send a thank you email”. Because computers can think faster than humans, they can then write emails faster than humans.
The most well-known LLM is GPT-3 created by Open AI.
How do AI Emails assistants make people more productive?
The good and bad of AI Email Assistants
- Good - They are great for sending generic transactional emails faster.
- Bad – They cannot easily write in your style, although a few AI Email Assistants are trying to fix that.
- Bad - Most AI Email assistants are based on data up until 2021, so they are not aware of recent events.
- Bad – Most AI Email assistants are best trained in English and thus weaker in other languages.
Should you use an AI Email Assistant?
If you send or receive more than 3 emails a day, you will probably benefit from an AI email assistant.
Comparing AI Email Assistants: Which one is right for you?
Google Smart Reply
Target group: Gmail users
Price: Free
Good: Built into Gmail, fast
Bad: Mostly short phrases rather than full emails, no advanced features like integrations into other software
Rapid Reply
Link: https://rapidreply.ai
Target group: Founders, business owners, execs, managers, leaders
Price: Free and $8/m Premium
Good: Advanced features – write longer emails, integrations with other software
Bad: Only works with Gmail / Google Workspace
Grammarly
Target group: Students and professionals
Price: Free, $12 per month
Good: Cross-platform (Google/Microsoft)
Bad: Focused on spelling and grammar corrections rather text completion (writing your full email fast)
Wordtune
Link: https://www.wordtune.com
Target group: Everyone
Price: Free, $9.99 per month
Good: Cross-platform
Bad: Only works with Gmail / Google workspace, focused on writing style rather than text completion (writing your full email fast)
Ellie AI
Link: https://tryellie.com
Target group: Everyone
Price: $16/m
Good: Multi-lingual, Chrome and Firefox browsers
Bad: No advanced features – integrations with other software
EmailTriager
Target group: Everyone
Price: ?
Good: Creates AI drafts as you receive emails
Bad: Only works with Gmail / Google workspace, focused on
GhostWrite
Target group: Everyone
Price: ?
Good: ?
Bad: Only works with Gmail / Google workspace, No advanced features – integrations with other software
Conclusion
AI Email Assistants will help you save time writing emails. The “trick” is to find the product that is right for you. These products are generally serving three main markets – Everyone, Professionals and Students, with free and paid pricing plans. Let’s see how this exciting area of AI evolves.