As an Apple Mail user in my personal life and a Gmail user in my professional life, I am surrounded by the default mail experiences that most people are familiar with. However, I’m always interested to see what third-party developers are doing to make the neverending deluge of emails easier to handle.
It looks like Superhuman might be doing just that. In a blog post, the company announced a new feature called Instant Reply. The feature, which is rolling out for Superhuman AI users over the next few days, will use artificial intelligence and generative AI to read the email someone sent you and come up with three potential responses.
Superhuman writes: “Imagine waking up to an inbox where every email has a draft reply. You would simply edit, then send. Sometimes, you wouldn’t even edit.” The company claims that, instead of being a short response like Gmail offers, Instant Reply generates full emails you can send to someone with few, if any, tweaks.
We show three draft replies under each conversation. Unlike Gmail, these replies are full emails, and are ready to send. Unlike Outlook, these replies are precomputed, so you never have to wait. Unlike all other email apps, you just hit Tab and then Enter, so this is blazingly fast. And like the rest of Superhuman AI, Instant Reply matches the voice and tone in the emails you’ve already sent, applying that to everything it creates.
The company says that it has been testing the feature with thousands of users so far and that those using the feature are sending emails around twice as fast as before. The feature is enabled by Superhuman’s close partnership with OpenAI, which also works with Microsoft on artificial intelligence features for its productivity apps.
You can check out a breakdown of Instant Reply in the video below:
The company says: “If you’re using Superhuman AI, you’ll start seeing Instant Reply over the next few days.” You can activate the feature in the Superhuman app by hitting Cmd+K (Mac) or Ctrl+K (Windows) → Activate Superhuman AI.
While this is a really cool idea, we’ll have to see how it works once it gets into the hands of all of the company’s users. We also have to remember that Superhuman, unlike Apple Mail and Gmail, costs up to $30 per month per user. As much as I’d love to wake up to my email replies written for me, I don’t think I can stomach paying more for an email app than I do for Netflix just yet.
