EP 81: How To Get AI to Read and Write Your Emails

This is the Everyday AI show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business and everyday life.

I'm going to come out and say this. If you're not using AI to read and respond to your emails, you're probably wasting your time, probably dozens of hours a week or more. All right, we're going to talk about that today on Everyday AI. My name is Jordan Wilson. I'm your host. This is, this is for you. This is what we do every single weekday. A live stream, a podcast in a free daily email newsletter, helping everyday people like you and me keep up with what's going on in the world of AI. If we can't make AI work for us, why are we paying attention to it? Well, I saw this as a problem a while ago. That's why I started Everyday AI. I said there's too much going on in the AI world and it's hard for everyday people to keep up. That's what this is. Thank you for tuning in. Before we talk about this, before we talk about how and why we should probably be having AI to read and respond to our emails, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. And as a reminder, if you are joining us live, thank you. Please drop a comment. This is better together. This is what we do, bringing a community of AI enthusiasts together to learn and hopefully help us grow our company and careers. But if you're listening on the podcast, don't worry, click in the show notes. There's going to be a bunch of links, including a link to go to a LinkedIn thread where you can ask questions. But also you'll see other related shows, how to sign up for our daily newsletter, all that good stuff. So let's get into the AI news. A lot of stuff going on today. First, AI is going to take over the world in the next decade. It's not what I said. Someone much smarter than me said this. So the Deep Mind is. And inflection CEO Mustafa Solomon said that. So this article, I think it's an article and a podcast, just dropped literally minutes ago. So the DeepMind CEO that is, yes, the DeepMind is Google's essentially AI arm, said that over the next decade, companies are not just companies, but countries, entire countries will completely change how they operate because of AI. And he more or less said that, yes, AI is going to take over. So we're going to have more about that kind of scary article in the newsletter today. So make sure you check it out. Next. An Iowa school district is using ChatGPT to ban books. Yes. A new, the new sweeping trend that I don't know what this means is people are banning books for whatever reason. So here's what happened in Iowa school district because of an Iowa state law had to said they had to ban certain books from the, from the school district. So it was the Mason City Community School District. And they use ChatGPT to essentially screen if books should be banned or not. And they couldn't contain and this is a quote, description or depiction of a sex act. So they use ChatGPT to see if these books should be banned or not. And obviously they got a lot of it wrong. Getting some false positives and a report from the Verge, which, which we'll link to in the newsletter, showed that so many of the books on their banned book list, they got it wrong. So no surprise there. Last news item of the, of the day, and certainly not least is Google is apparently going to release an AI life coach. That's right. I didn't stutter or say the wrong thing there. Google, the search giant that has probably all of our data, is testing out a new AI powered assistant that's going to be your life coach. Right? So I don't know, our life's, our life coach is going to be out of business soon. Are we all just going to be talking to, to Google to coach us through our next big promotion or relationship advice? Maybe. I wouldn't, I wouldn't doubt it. It's a strange world we're living in. All right, so thank you. We got a lot of comments coming in. Let's talk email. Let's talk email, y'. All. First, I want to ask, I want to ask all of you a question. How many hours would you say you spend a week reading and replying to emails? So not just reading and replying, but also, you know, if, if, if maybe, you know, your boss asks you for some numbers, you were right. And you will, you were thinking, okay, I didn't think I was going to be. But how much time are you spending to read and respond to emails and the corresponding work manual work that is tied to reading and responding to emails? Let me know, let me know in the comments. I mean, how many hours a week do you spend? Two hours a week? Do you spend a hundred hours a week? How many hours do you spend reading and responding to emails? Because I want to talk about that today because I think there's some very important updates that we all need to be talking about. So let's, let's get into it. But first I want to shout out some, some people that are joining us live. Thank you. And like I said, if you're listening on the podcast, please click the show notes. Come leave us a comment. So thank you all for joining us. Woozies joining us from Kansas City. P.J. good morning. Michael, Good morning. Fabian. Hello. Internet Fabian joining us from Chile. Thank you. Brian, thank you for joining us. Sri from Bali. All right, Elliot, good morning. Dr. Rastafa. Dr. Rastafa joined. I went live last night. He's joining me late at night, early in the morning. Thank you for joining, Harold, thank you for joining. Audrey. Wow, so many, so, so many people already joining and I can't even get to them all. But George Strom saying thanks for joining. George saying, excited for this one, looking forward to having AI reply to all of my emails. Laugh out, laugh out loud. All right, so I asked how many hours people were spending. So, you know, George here said 30% of my time. That's a lot of hours. When you think in a week that's probably for most people, 15 plus hours. PJ says eight. Robert Carter, thank you for joining, says 10. Elliot says 25%, Harold says 20. Right. So here's, here's what's happening. The majority, right? Not the majority, but for those people that said 20, 25, a third of my time, that's a lot of hours, right? That's a lot of hours a week. So let me go ahead and skip to the end, all right? I'm not going to make you guys wait and listen to me ramble on for 20, 30 minutes to get to the end. All right, so let's start at the end. Probably within a year or so, whether you're preparing to do this or not, you are going to have fully AI enabled email. All right, so let's start at the end and then we're going to work our way and we're going to say, here's how you can get there. All right, here's what I'm talking about. So if you're joining me live, I'm sharing my screen. If you're not, don't worry, I'm going to explain everything. So if you haven't heard of Microsoft Copilot, you will know it fairly soon. So I'd say the overwhelming majority, at least here in the US of people, you know who I always say working a desk job, but I'm going to say everyday people, you probably have a Windows PC and you're probably using Outlook. And that might be one of the reasons right now that maybe you're not using AI to read and respond to your emails. Also, what's super important for me to say before you take, take my advice and, you know, install something that uses AI to read and respond to your emails, always keep in mind the confidentiality of any of your emails, documents, all of that. Right. I have to get that out of the way because normally when you are allowing an AI to access your emails, again, you're not making these things public. They're not going to be posted anywhere. But that information is technically no longer private. So keep that in mind. But let's talk about Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot, I think is going to be a game changer. So this is Microsoft's. It's actually going to be baked into their operating system. Okay? So if you're trying to hold off AI and not learn it, just know it is coming to your entire operating system. With Microsoft Copilot, which they've already started to release in a beta version, okay, what that means is you are going to have essentially a generative AI assistant that follows you around on your entire computer. And you might think that's a scary thing. I think that's an amazing thing. So when someone emails you and says, hey, what about this presentation? Do we get to it or not? With Microsoft Copilot, it's not just tied to your, to your browser or an extension. It is your entire computer if you are using the Microsoft product. So if you're using their Browser, Outlook, email, PowerPoint, it will, it has the knowledge for everything that you're doing on all of those. So if someone's asking you, sending you an email about that presentation, even if you haven't read that presentation, copilot will be able to answer questions about it or that spreadsheet in, in Excel, or that long Word document that maybe you did or did not read. So AI is coming for your entire operating system. So if for whatever reason you're trying to not learn AI or not even, or say, all right, I'm not going to use AI in my email, guess what? It's coming whether, whether you want to or not. So if you're still fighting off using AI in your email, the writing's on the wall. All right, so this is with copilot, it is your entire operating system, all right, all of Microsoft's products. So again, that's your email, your calendar, which right there is so much of your day to day and what you might be replying in an email, but then Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint. So I'm trying to get someone from Microsoft on the show. They've. I've had one or two people confirm they're coming on, so hopefully we can ask them about this soon. But emails, guys, that's the least of what you're going to be using AI for. All right, so you might be saying, all right, Jordan. Well, I don't use. We don't use Windows. We don't use Outlook. We're Google people, right? Guess what? Same thing. Same thing, y'. All, Google has already started to slowly roll this out, so I believe it's called Duet AI. So for Google Workspace, same exact thing. So I'm sharing that on my screen now. Same thing. This is different. It's not in your operating system, but if you're using Gmail or G Suite. That's why I wanted to go over Outlook in Gmail G Suite, because that's probably 90% of people, at least here in the US are using one of those two. So the same thing, Google is going to be working in AI across all of its products. Right? So your Google Slides, your email, your Google Docs, your Google Sheets, it's all going to be connected. All right. This is, this is. This isn't something out, you know, a decade in the future. This is already rolling out to people, right. I don't have access to it yet. You know, they're. I'm on an old G Suite account that I need to port over, but they're already releasing all of this. All right. Yeah. Like, like what Harvey says here. Dr. Harvey Castro, thanks for joining us. He says co pilot rocks. This talk could be a PowerPoint. This can all be indexed. Absolutely. Right? Yeah. And what Harold's saying here, co pilot teams, Power Automate, Power Bi Blended, is going to be wonderful. But guess what? This is all coming whether we want to or not. So that's the end. Now I'm gonna hit rewind. All right. And let's talk about how can you do this? Now it's like, all right, Jordan, cool. And I don't know, here's the thing. Microsoft Copilot and Google Google Duet, and they're kind of Google Duets. Kind of email piece, I believe is just called Write. Write for me is what it's called. And then Google's or, sorry, Microsoft Copilot is, is kind of what will be used to interact with your emails. Right. So this is coming whether you want to or not, but it could be months. It could Be a year plus before you, you get access to that. So I, I'd say this again, keep the confidentiality of your emails in mind. I can't speak for everyone. For me, I don't, I don't care. I don't. Right. But I'd say, why are you waiting, why are you waiting to have AI read and respond to your emails? The writing is on the wall. The two biggest companies that control email pretty much worldwide are rolling this out. And I know that sounds crazy because yes, we are going to have one AI that is analyzing and writing emails and essentially the other person on the other end is going to probably be using AI to read and summarize and respond to emails. It's, it's weird. We're essentially going to have AI's writing and responding and analyzing things back and forth. Maybe just as a culture, we should just get better with emails. Right? That's, that, that's a whole another show. But the writing's on the wall, y', all, so what can you do now? I got you. Let's talk about it. So if you don't want to wait for these, these new rollouts, if you want to get your, get your feet wet in having AI read and respond to your emails, I got you. I got you. All right, so a couple things to keep in mind. We already talked about confidentiality, so don't just take my advice and blame it on me. All right, Also with this right now there are free versions of different apps and extensions that you can use right now. And then there's versions that are paid. Okay. And a lot of these different options that I'm going to be telling you about, some of them you can use an open AI key. So if you have a paid open AI or chat GPT plus account, which you should, then you can tap into that and use your own key and it'll be much cheaper. All right, so let's take a look one at a time here. All right, Please keep these comments coming. I appreciate them even if I don't get to them live on the show. Don't worry, I'm gonna get to them in the, in the comments right afterwards. And you know what, I'm just gonna go ahead and take a, because I can, I can take a little 20 second pause and run a commercial. All right, I'm going to go ahead and do that because it's important because I'm about to drop a lot of different names, apps, extensions and information and it's going to be too fast for you to keep up but don't worry, because what I want you all to do right now. Go ahead. It's in the links. Go to your everyday AI dot com. All right, let me go ahead and throw this up on the screen. Put your email in right there. All right, subscribe to our daily newsletter. If you aren't already, let me just show you. Here's our email newsletter from yesterday. It's amazing. So yesterday we had an amazing guest on Drew Brucker talking about Mid Journey. So every day we break down not just the AI news, but also this podcast, right? So we have a podcast recap, High level, right? We preview our other shows. Coming up we have our Fresh Find section which is our favorite AI content from across the web. We recap the daily news. We have an AI in 5 section which is essentially just, I think, super helpful. This is how you can actually use different AI. And then we break down the episode, right? Go into great depth. And it's not just here's a bunch of information, but we talk about, here's how you can actually use it, right? And we usually have a three step breakdown. So I said that now because I'm about to start rattling off a bunch of useful information. So if you can't type down notes fast enough, don't worry, just subscribe to the newsletter. All right, here we go. Let's start at the top. Outlook. What can you do with Outlook now before Microsoft Copilot comes out? Well, Outlook is a little more closed. It's a little more closed off, right? But I did find a couple, you know, did a lot of research. I was up late last night because I want to make sure that you guys all have the latest and most accurate information. So Mail Maestro is one of the few kind of alternatives or options that I saw that works directly in Outlook. Right? Because here's the other thing. If you want to read and respond to your emails, there's so many options out there that in theory can do it, but you have to copy and paste an email into a separate program and then you have to take the information there and bring it back. That's not very effective. That's not using AI to our advantage. So Mail Maestro works inside of Outlook and can read and respond to your emails. All right, so if you're using Outlook, that's not your only option, but that's one of the few that works directly or you can use third party apps, right? So you can essentially an example of a third party app would be Apple's Mail program, right, where you put in your credentials and you know, you might have to use a little bit of technical things like an IMAP address, but there's third party essentially applications that you can download and connect your Outlook email to. Right. And some of those third party options, again you wouldn't be using the Outlook program, but you can essentially put in your Outlook credentials to use these programs. And there's two that I think that are really good that you can use your with Outlook and connect your email to. So those third party apps that can read and respond to your email are Canary Mail and then Shortwave. All right, and then there's also others that I think are great but are more for specific purposes such as Addy AI that also works externally with, with Outlook, but it's, it's more geared toward customer service. Okay, so those are what I would recommend looking into. I'm going to leave the comments in this thread as well. And don't worry, it's all going to be on our website and on the in our newsletter. All right, I'm going to take a five second break here and look at the comments. I want to make sure that we're interacting. And again, if you're listening on the podcast, I always leave a link to even my LinkedIn to email us, whatever. So if you have a question, make sure, make sure you come back and let us know. Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and built a straight path to ROI on Gen. What's up? So Val says he uses Superhuman for email. Another great program. Absolutely. I don't use it personally, but I know Superhuman is great for this and just for having a very minimalistic email interface. Brian, thank you. Brian says he loves the AI in five. Coach P.J. thank you. Coach P.J. joining us from YouTube, says it's the best newsletter ever. I didn't pay everyone to say this, but thank you guys. All right, so thanks, Audrey. Audrey also said subscribe if you haven't. All right, so let's, let's now talk about Gmail and G Suite. And this is where, trust me, just sign up for the newsletter. I'm going to be rattling off different apps and extensions for G Suite Gmail that can read and respond to your email. There's many more options with Gmail and G Suite. It is a little more open than Microsoft Outlook and kind of the reason being is because it's browser based, right? People for the most part are using the Outlook app to access their email. Some people are using it online, but most people access their Gmail G Suite email via the browser. And if you're using the Chrome browser, which I would highly recommend, it's. It's Gmail. Right? So that's their browser. It's Google's browser, Chrome. By the way, I have, I've used, and I kid you not y', all, I've used thousands with an S. Thousands of Chrome extensions over the years. I have a collection. I have Chrome extensions that help me manage my Chrome extensions. Anyways, so so many of these are Chrome extensions. Again, some are free, some are paid, but here's the list in what I think are probably the best. I'm going to go with the top tier ones here. Ready? Hyper, right, Fantastic. I'm gonna get someone from hyperrite on the show. Then we have Hyper type. Okay, I'm actually going to pull up a couple of these on the screen. All right. Not all of them because there's a lot, but I want, for those of you joining live, I want you to at least be able to kind of see them all right, so we have Hyper, right. Right here. I'm going to show some of my favorites. So Hyper, right? Fantastic. They're one of the, I'd say they were one of the, not first, but one of the biggest in the GPT space. So again, the GPT technology that is used oftentimes to read and analyze and respond to emails has been out way before Chat GPT. So hyperrite is one of the first bigger companies I think that offered along with Copy, AI, Jasper, Slash, Jarvis, they were one of the first. So Hyper, right, Fantastic. Similarly, and this is a kind of, kind of a newer one But I think still fantastic. Hyper Type, right, so they kind of sound the same. Hyper Right. Hypertype, those are I think two great ones. Then we also have Flow Right, all right, so some of these, you know, I think hypertype and hypertype and Flow right are really just dedicated to reading and responding to emails, whereas Hyper Right is more of an all purpose kind of GPT tool. All right, those are fantastic. And the great thing, I believe with Hyper Right specifically and hypertype, it also learns from your previous emails and how you would normally respond. That's one of the biggest things. And I think I left a link in the description of a previous episode where we talked about how you can get GPT and AI to write more like you. I think it was with Audrey Chia who was in the comments right here. So shout out Audrey. But that part's important because if you are going to use AI GPT, you don't want to just come off so robotic. So I believe Hyper Write and hypertype and probably a couple of the other tools already analyze how you would normally respond to your emails. Because that's the biggest thing. If you just use a new tool for the first time and you're like, yeah, sure, I'll use AI to read and respond to my emails. I'm spending, you know, 30% of my time like, like George said, or I'm spending who else said? You know, a lot of people said 10 to 20 hours a week or 25% of my time, like Elliot said, that's like 15 hours a week. Right? So you would want to make sure that those emails can read and respond like you. Hyper Right. Hypertype, I believe Flow. Right and others index your emails that you've already responded to and do that A lot of these others and I'm going to start rattling off a lot of other names now, at bare minimum, at least give you tones that you can choose from, right? And even in your prompts you can say, write a casual response that addresses these three bullet points and then you can just create bullet points, right? So so many of these different options, I can't go over them all in depth. But even if they're not going to read your entire email history and to kind of be able to know and understand how you would respond, you at least have some tone controls and you can obviously give it inputs and say, right, that's the other thing I should have started with this guys. People are like, oh, read and respond to emails, that's too much control. Almost all of these options, they're not just going to read and respond without your consent. It's going to read and respond and type something out. You still are the one hitting send. Don't worry, none of these are just like. At least I don't think that are just reading and responding to your emails without your knowledge. It's not happening. You have to enact, you have to enable them. Should have started with that at the top, but a couple others. A couple others, right again, they're all going to be in the newsletter. A couple other good ones for Gmail, G Suite and one or two of these might have Outlook, but we have Draft Lab, Ellie Merlin, Magical AI, Jasper Max, AI Compose AI. I'm not gonna lie y'. All. I was up until, let's see, I was actually on a live stream last night until about 11pm my time and then I spent two hours last night doing backup research on this episode because things in the AI world change so quickly and I don't want to be giving y' all outdated or incorrect information. So like I said, these are all going to be in the newsletter. Don't worry. And yes, like Phoebe said, AI is changing the static quo. Yes, Trevor 2 hours 2 hours after shout out to Trevor Go Trevor. If if you want, go ahead and drop the link to to our episode. We had a fun conversation last night, but I want to know why are you all not using AI to read and respond to your emails? Let me know are you now that we did this deep dive and again, as as we wrap things up here, I hope this was helpful for you. If it was, let me know. If you have other questions, let me know. But let me end this episode with kind of the way I started it. All right? I said I wasn't going to make you wait 25 minutes to get the end takeaway. I told you in the beginning, AI is going to be reading and responding and analyzing almost all of our emails whether we think it is or not. Here's why. Because the two biggest companies that control email, at least here in the US and I think probably worldwide, are Microsoft and Google. So Microsoft Outlook and then Google has their Gmail or G suite. I think they call it Google Workplace now. And like we talked about at the top of the show, Microsoft is releasing Copilot, which is literally generative AI in the operating system, which is wild. I might actually buy a PC for the first time in 20 plus years just so I can use this. I'm extremely excited about Microsoft Copilot. It is powerful. It might seem creepy to some, but I think it's going to be the next level of efficiency. So one of the biggest things that Microsoft Copilot is going to be able to do is it's going to be able to analyze everything. So when someone emails you an Outlook and they're like, hey, could you look at this spreadsheet? And then update the PowerPoint, right? So go into Excel, here's all this information we need to update this PowerPoint. And hey, we have some, some notes here in the, in the Microsoft Word document that might take someone 20 hours to do, right? It's a lot of work. If, if it's highly detailed, Microsoft Copilot is going to put that on literally autopilot. That's why they're putting the word Pilot in there. It is going to do all of that for you baked into the Microsoft operating system. I cannot emphasize enough how much our world is going to change once that gets released and once the entire world has access to that. So emails, reading and respond, that's the least it's going to do. So if you, if you're not already, if you're using Outlook and you're hesitant, this is what's happening. This isn't some half baked feature that you know, it's, it's, it's from the gray market. This is Microsoft releasing it on their operating system, right? That's number one. Number two, Google Duet, similar thing. Google is releasing this across all of their products. So the same thing. Your Gmail will be able to talk to your Google Docs, we'll be able to talk to your Google Sheets, we'll be able to talk to your Google Slides. So again, like so much of what we do as everyday people, if you're working a desk job, you're working in emails, spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoints, Google Slides, right? All of these things, Microsoft and Google are tying them all to an AI ecosystem. An email is where it all starts and usually where it all ends. So again, I hope this was helpful. I hope this conversation helped some of you. Let me know if it did. It was a lot, I understand, but the takeaway here, you should be using AI to read and respond to your emails. Keep confidential, confidential confidentiality in mind, right? Always keep that in mind. Don't just take my word for it. Make sure that right now you can. But AI is coming for your emails, so why aren't you just using it now to read and respond, to analyze and to save hours, probably a day, but probably dozens of hours a week. So if this was helpful as a reminder, please go to your everyday AI.com we went over a lot of tips, tools, techniques. We're going to lay them all out in the newsletter that goes out every single Weekday morning around 11:00am Central Standard Time. If you're not signed up like Audrey said. I didn't say it. Audrey said it. She said subscribe if you haven't highly recommend it. Great stuff. And then PJ said it too. Best newsletter ever. So we went over a lot. Make sure to sign up for that newsletter. I hope this was helpful. I hope to see you back tomorrow and every day with Everyday AI. Thank you.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit youreverydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.