
Show HN: Say Less – AI summarization tool in the Gmail compose window - yoavz
https://sayless.email/
======
filleokus
I don't know if it's just me, but I very much prefer easy to skim emails to
more dense ones.

At one point I got weekly project updates from a team I was working with, and
one guy wrote dense, short, emails where I would have to read every sentence
carefully to get a hang on what was going on. Another guy would write longer,
fluffier emails but with bullet points and paragraphs in the same order:

> Hi everyone!

> {fluff}

> {general status}

>

> \- Bullet points of things done that week

> {comment about things done}

>

> \- Bullet points of things to do next week

> {comment about potential problems etc}

>

> {fluff}

> {annoyingly long footer}

Just by parsing the number of bulletpoints, and the length of each bullet
point (and the first word) I would get a surprisingly good grasp on how things
were going, and what was hard/complicated (longer bullet point -> more
complex), and very easy to read about exactly I wanted to know.

~~~
hdfhu
This is how the so called sutras are written: a page of text gets compressed
into one short sentence, so you have to stop after each of them and spend an
hour unpacking its meaning, but the entire book is often just 200 sentences.

~~~
drieddust
Sutras like Panini's Grammer written 5th century BC are great product of
formal knowledge from India. However, writing emails is not the same thing:

\- Sutras solved the problem to retaining large chunks of knowledge.

\- Sutras had formal rules to keep the meaning unambiguous.

\- Sutras were written by the sages who had lot of knowledge and control over
language.

-Sutras were written in Sanskrit. A highly malleable (due to SANDHI and SAMAS) yet a precise language.

\- English is not the right language to write tersely.

------
tylermenezes
I like the idea of this product but

(1) sometimes a BIT of a personal touch goes a long way

(2) even in the examples you give it misses potentially important context. Eg
In the board message example, it removes a reminder of the topics. How could
you know those weren't necessary? Why is the number of members what it
included?

Just doesn't seem ready for prime-time for this use.

My preference would be having it suggest shorter versions of each paragraph
inline or something.

~~~
GordonS
Agreed, some people really don't like terse emails.

I actually got myself into trouble a couple of years back because of this.
I've been working with Norwegians almost my whole working life, and am used to
being terse, direct and honest. Aside from that, I'm an extrovert, and don't
talk unless I have something to say.

Anyway, then I got placed as tech lead for a UK project, working remotely.
Within a week, the PM had made a complaint to my manager that I was being glib
and not listening to other points of view.

I had no clue where any of this had come from, and sat down with the PM to try
to understand - if I'd given the wrong impression, I wanted to fix it. Anyway,
we looked back through piles of emails, and in every single case it was a
misunderstanding of my real intentions that was directly linked to terseness.

From then on I've tried to gauge my audience better - always using
salutations, using longer sentences to say the same thing, trying to be softer
etc. I think by and large this has been successful, although I am finding
recently my emails tend to be _too_ long...

~~~
manigandham
Why do you have to change and not them? Especially if you sat down with them
and discussed it?

~~~
GordonS
Because unfortunately the world doesn't revolve around me :)

It wasn't only the PM, the AI lead apparently felt the same, although I think
the AI lead was the one that kicked up a fuss in the first place.

At first I was really pissed off - I didn't think I'd done anything wrong, and
was completely baffled about the complaint. I went over my emails myself, and
thought about calls we'd had, and I just didn't get it. TBH, I still don't
understand how it could have been misconstrued, but I have to accept that it
_was_.

Anyway, I guess the point is that while I'm terse, open and honest, not
everyone else is. Consider your recipients before sending that mail - who are
they, where are they from, what approach are they likely to be receptive to.

~~~
ska
>"Anyway, I guess ... to be receptive to."

In other words, developing your communication skills can have good impact.

------
dillondoyle
Have you tested this in marketing emails? that seems to be the profitable
marketplace. Even if you can prove 5% increase in roi that's worth a lot to a
lot of people!

There are some interesting studies showing short emails perform better but we
haven't found that to be true it seems the message is the biggest factor. Some
way to improve the message is even more valuable but also likely a much harder
ML task

~~~
yoavz
The original inspiration and example featured on the website was from a blog
post on cold "welcome" email copy: [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-
rates/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-rates/).

I'd love to test it on more marketing emails, or content marketing -- these
seem to be the two applications with the most direct ROI.

------
sna1l
I think there is still a way to go here.

For example, the "really" in "really appreciate" isn't useful.

Also the last sentence in the "summarized" version reads: "If for any reason
you haven't let, let me know..." I would also that that the "for any reason"
is not useful, it is again implied.

You don't need "by now", it is implied.

~~~
gavinray
Why does it seem common for people to knock modifiers for degree/intensity
with words.

The statements "That's nice." and "That's really, truly nice." give off very
different messages.

One of them I'm not even sure if you're being short or dismissive/not
interested, and I have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what the
underlying tone is.

Just one or two words makes a massive (see what I did there) difference in
tone + perception.

This is half the reason why it's hard working remotely. I put so much effort
into being overly polite/nice with tone because you lose out on all other
social cues and it's easy to mistake an ambiguous message.

------
ipnon
I'm reminded of the recent post on HN showing that long, personalized emails
reduced email conversions, and that short, pinpointed emails increased
conversion. Long emails give the impression that one is either a program or
desperate, and no one takes the time to read the entirety of every email they
receive.

~~~
yoavz
Author here.

If you're talking about [https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-
rates/](https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-rates/), this was a primary
inspiration for this project -- I even stole the name ;)

~~~
ipnon
I am, here's the recent discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23939462](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23939462)

------
ron22
What about Read Less?

Would be cool to use this tool to read less of incoming email and then dig
deeper if I think it's worth it.

~~~
yoavz
When I was researching this product area, I found a bunch of similar tools
that summarized on the inbound side. I thought it would be more interesting to
experiment on the outbound side as the main initial focus, which I haven't
seen.

I do have a generic popup that you can to summarize any passage, so you could
copy-paste some long passage (email, article) to piggy back on the
functionality. But it isn't tightly integrated into the Gmail UI as of now.

------
pryelluw
The demo gif is too long. Gave me the feeling that this product would force me
to waste a lot of time waiting for it to load

------
generalizations
Based on some digging around, it looks like the app is made with Facebook AI's
BART model [1]. The only summarization implementation I spotted was made by
huggingface (of course). [2]

[1]
[https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/bart](https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/bart)

[2] [https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-
cnn](https://huggingface.co/facebook/bart-large-cnn)

~~~
yoavz
Yes, you are correct -- I linked to this research on the frontpage as a
citation.

------
zupa-hu
I see the biggest opportunity here in summarizing books and blog posts. At
least for me.

Too often, after reading a blog post, I feel like it was a waste of time. I'd
prefer to read a super dense summary first. Then optionally select longer
variants before reading the full thing.

Maybe There could be a compress function [1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, ...]. Choose
the compression level before reading.

Especially with books. I'm not sure how well this could work, but I'd prefer
to read 100 books that way first, before deciding on the few I actually want
to read.

I'd totally pay for this.

------
colincooke
The issue with efficient summarization is the necessity of context. For a
message to be effectively summarized you require a bit of "theory of mind"[0],
you need to have at least a decent idea of what the receiver already knows.
This is something that, especially when done for a single message at a time
(with no other info), likely doesn't have a global solution.

Edit: I should be clearer, I believe that the solution shown here does not
have this capability, and the effort of using ML to do message summarization
is flawed in the general case.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind)

~~~
ClassAndBurn
Your edit and summarization is quite clear. Thank you for that.

------
setgree
I'm excited to see where this goes -- both this product and the general idea
of using ML to reduce noise in interpersonal communications.

A human can read the shorter summary and add personal touches as they wish,
but the first pass of what the model considers to be extraneous is interesting
by itself.

I just put in a 300 word personal email and it spit out a 60 word summary that
actually did extract the one concrete piece of news I was sharing, and just
cut everything else. That's not precisely what I wanted in this case, but it
wasn't a bad guess at all.

Side note: just finished a rewatch of Silicon Valley, I like that the sample
text is from someone at Hooli, I wonder if it will change my .... to ... :)

~~~
Cyphase
So long as it's not doing that while operating on ciphertext.

------
aftergibson
Neat idea, I could definitely be more terse in my comms.

As an FYI, some bad English on the Hooli Onboarding Email example:

    
    
        If for any reason you haven't let, let me know and I'll make sure you get them.

~~~
yoavz
Good looking out! Will fix that.

------
contingencies
Short emails tend to be either notifications, highly transactional (web based
platforms are better for these as they can do tracking and trigger other
outside actions), vague, or assume outside context.

These are the same problems as always-on corporate instant messaging
platforms, just slightly improved by the cross-organizational functionality
and store-and-forward.

IMHO organizations should strive to make email less like instant messaging and
more like letters. Fully formed thoughts distributed less frequently and with
more purpose.

In short, tax hassling others.

~~~
yoavz
Interesting take because there is a school of thought that comes to the
opposite conclusion: emails should be more like text messages:
[http://five.sentenc.es/](http://five.sentenc.es/).

I think the most interesting part of this problem is the ambiguity in desired
result. Emails are inherently unstructured text data, which results in
conflict about how people want them to look like.

------
bobbydreamer
Seriously. I already write short mails and put bullet points which makeout
much smaller. This year one of things I want to do is write big emails like
paragraphs atleast two.

------
t_serpico
I've never written an email that was too long and then later realized it
should have been way more concise. I generally know my intentions prior to
writing the email, so if it needs to be short, I'll write it short. The
reverse situation probably happens more often though (i.e I write a short
email, realize it doesn't make sense due to lack of details, then I
elaborate).

~~~
cabaalis
I intentionally write short, concise emails.

It has actually backfired on me in the past: because I didn't define and
explain the entire space of the matter at hand, I was overcome by other
arguments or ideas that I'd already considered and dismissed. That led to
followup discussions that didn't need to occur.

It seems that context matters, sometimes long-form is better.

~~~
FillardMillmore
I tend to write longer e-mails - but I agree with you, long-form and short-
form e-mails are both optimal for different situations.

The problem seems to be that it's a judgement call - and I'm not exactly sure
of all factors/variables that are involved in that judgement call. The subject
at hand, the audience, the depth of the e-mail thread to which you're
replying, time-sensitivity of the subject, etc. - they all play a role. But my
default position tends to be that I'll save time explaining in future e-mails
by providing all relevant details at hand now.

------
motohagiography
Super cool. Would add this as a company gmail feature.

However, I also write emails to reduce time spent in conversation, so while I
have learned to be more terse, when I'm not, it's to provide references so
that I can shorten or preclude a conversation.

An ML email shortener is a fantastic idea for business comms, with the caveat
that short email culture can also reward vagueness.

~~~
jschwartzi
Shortness shouldn't be the goal. Clarity should be the goal. The problem is
that clarity is a much harder thing to test for.

I would pay money for a tool that checks my technical writing for reading
level and warns me when passages go above Nth grade. Most people in the US
graduate high school with an 8th grade reading level, and some people may not
be able to read above a 5th grade level. That means tiny words and short
sentences are king.

There are also metrics for clarity and simplicity that proxy on number of
syllables. Those are really useful and don't require a complex ML model.

~~~
yoavz
[https://readable.com/](https://readable.com/) is an interesting tool I came
across in my research you might be interested in. It relies on the
Flesch–Kincaid readability tests [1] and has found sustained usage.

Actually, now that I think about it... this might be a good source for
bootstrapping further training data.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readability_tests)

------
notadev
Coincidentally I've been feeling like my emails are becoming way too verbose
recently. I'm not sure what it is, but I'm just taking longer to reply in a
way that conveys my message properly, or I'm finding myself editing a draft to
death before I ever send it. I used to be able to just reply and move it to
the next bucket.

------
czbond
Can I use this in conversations with my wife? So much talking. ;)

Joking aside - this is a great tool in corporate settings. In technology, one
works with two types: Very verbose (tend to be introvert or detail oriented)
or Too abbreviated. I cannot stand reading detailed accounts - and this could
add to many professionals comprehending more.

------
jackblemming
If this could convert passive voice to active voice, or underline it as an
error, this could be a great technical writing tool for inexperienced writers.
Good technical writing is hard, a tool similar to this could be useful.

------
k2xl
I wonder how this would perform compared to using GPT-3

~~~
yoavz
I just got access to GPT3! Have only played around with it for a few hours so
far, but haven't gotten it to reliably summarize.

------
dogweather
Nice job doing the last mile and making it a usable service.

Just guessing: SMMRY or Quillbot with a little enhancement to preserve the
salutation?

~~~
yoavz
Nope, I've developed and hosted my own summarization API here. It does heavily
rely on open-source machine learning libraries and research / datasets
released by Facebook AI [1]

[1] [https://ai.facebook.com/research/publications/bart-
denoising...](https://ai.facebook.com/research/publications/bart-denoising-
sequence-to-sequence-pre-training-for-natural-language-generation-translation-
and-comprehension/)

