

Show HN: mail2brain, email attachment timesaver - jamesbowman
http://mail2brain.com/

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jamesbowman
Yes, mturk is the backend. Amazon links can monetize it.

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Robin_Message
If mturk is the back end, you _need_ to tell users that a human will listen to
their voicemail and look at their stuff. I assumed you had voice recognition
software and clever image stuff, not random humans. The privacy issues of this
are horrid; at least make it obvious what will happen.

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jamesbowman
Yes, you are right. How about a strap line across the bottom:

"Powered by Mechanical Turk: humans write these answers"

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mattmillr
I'd put it at the top:

Email an attachment to go@mail2brain.com and a human will turn it into
something useful:

Frame it as a feature :)

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chime
Email an attachment to go@mail2brain.com and a real person will turn it into
something useful

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mgkimsal
Interesting idea. Wondering A) how this is done (mturk?) and B) how this will
be monetized.

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jasonlbaptiste
I really really like it, but I can see this getting very expensive, very fast.

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almost
Kitchen Towels are not the most exciting of demo images :)

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hristov
Now that you have made it clear that humans will see each message get ready
for a torrent of penis photos. Some times I feel bad for the mechanical
turkers.

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dreur
Better explanation would be great, still wondering what it does - What is the
common use case ?

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hazmattron
Potential application: a user with a camera phone that doesn't have support
for barcode reader applications (not Android, iOS, etc) but can send an email
with a photo attachment could analyze a barcode with this service. But here
the lack of immediacy might be an issue...

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ComputerGuru
Can this scale? The problem with mturk is you can't make _any_ QoS guarantees.

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Zak
"How did we do" should allow for comments. I rated a response "ok" but would
have preferred to be able to explain that it was good that the source of the
image was identified, but bad that the associated product was not.

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jamesbowman
Common use cases:

transcribing voicemails from emails.

finding products for shopping without having to do the search yourself.

~~~
mattmillr
I understand these use cases, but I'm not sure the attachments related to
these things are already in my email frequently enough for this to be useful.

My voicemail is on my cellphone or in Google voice (where it already has a
humorous machine translation that might be good enough.) If I want to take a
picture of a product, the closest camera is in my phone and there's already an
Amazon app for that.

Perhaps you could de-emphasize the "attachment" part, which makes me think of
files and serious emailing, and emphasize "send a picture" which I can do
quickly from my phone. I know it's the same thing, but the different wordings
send my brain in different directions.

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ydant
Are you aware that the Amazon app for Android / iPhone already does the
product lookup / barcode scanning ("by humans") for you?

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wa0
mail2brain.com took 6 minutes to identify the product Product: Spiderman Link:
[http://mail2brain.com/static/f00dba0fe1218b1f9b5becd0483e869...](http://mail2brain.com/static/f00dba0fe1218b1f9b5becd0483e869529ff92c8_full.jpg)
Well, heavy heavy cool frontend for mturk :)

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endlessvoid94
this is fantastic. good idea.

