This App Uses Artificial Intelligence to Manage Your Mailbox
There was a day a few years ago when I received 1000 letters.
I am very wary of using my email address on online forms and the like, but every time I go to a conference or attend an industry event, I somehow manage to subscribe to a dozen or so more linked lists thanks to that someone is losing consciousness my children.
No matter how careful you are, if you are not diligent, your inbox can easily get out of hand. And when it gets too full, you end up missing out on the emails you want to see because they are somehow buried in a bunch of emails that you don’t.
There is now a new app that wants to provide a robotic helping hand to make navigating the chaos easier. The Android and iOS app called Astro has an AI assistant built into it that reminds you to reply to emails from friends and also prompts you to unsubscribe from promotional emails you never open.
I have been using it for a little over a month now and have been very impressed.
At first glance, it looks like any other email application. Your messages are split into two Inboxes: Priority, full of messages he thinks you want to see, and Other with everything else. The app also offers some other features like email tracking and snoozing.
That’s great and all, but the real magic comes from the in-app digital assistant. When you click on this, the assistant makes reasonable suggestions about what you should do, depending on how he sees you interacting with your inbox. For example, today Astro asked me if I wanted it to automatically archive messages from Grubhub because it looks like I didn’t read them (or, more accurately, I didn’t even realize I was following them), and suggested that my girlfriend add Allison is on my VIP list because it looks like we hang out a lot.
Yes, I could go through my mailbox and sort things out myself. But would I? Probably no. And these are the questions I could answer when I rode Lyft to meet a friend.
Slack integration has been added to the app this week. So, if you’re like me and hide your face in your Slack channel all day, the app can tell you when an important email arrives. They also went further to make Astro’s search bar work with Slack, so if you can’t remember if you had a conversation with a colleague in Slack or by email (the answer is always the opposite of what you think), you can search in both at once.
Astro also works with Alexa, so you can let her read messages and even send quick hands-free replies while you’re still in bed or making breakfast in the morning. And it’s all free.
You can try it here for Android and here for iOS .