As Google turns your inbox into a virtual assistant of sorts, we decided to draft a brief overview of AI-driven features popular e-mail services offer their users.
This week, Gmail – a global mail service with 1,8 billion active users, has introduced brand new AI tools to simplify one’s routine inbox management. Here’s what’s new:
- AI Inbox view replaces the traditional email list with a dynamic, task-oriented summary with suggested to-dos and priority topics to catch up on;
- Gemini AI generates concise summaries of long email threads and provides answers to user questions just like AI assistant bots, based on your mail history;
- Help Me Write function lets you draft entire emails from simple prompts;
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Suggested Replies are now not only providing basic smart replies, but also draft more sophisticated responses that match your tone and conversation context;
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Proofread checks your grammar, clarity, and even gives style suggestions before you hit the ‘send’ button.
All those actionable analytic features and insights are one of the biggest Gmail updates in years, which will help the service go in line with the latest AI innovations, while users don’t have to use third-party AI assistants in separate tabs. What about the rest of the e-mail services? Let’s check how they compare.
Outlook uses Microsoft 365 Copilot AI capabilities to help users draft and respond to emails, summarize threads with highlighted key points, and reorganize their inboxes via natural language prompts. Furthermore, you can ask Copilot to schedule meetings, find important messages, move messages into certain folders, and even set reminders for upcoming events. The solution has cross-platform operability, too. It can pull context from Teams, Files, Calendar, etc., for richer results.
Apple Mail leverages proprietary Apple Intelligence to highlight important emails and show summaries below messages. Besides, Apple’s mail also offers suggested replies to help users compose fast responses, and built-in writing tools which refine your draft grammatically and stylistically.
Proton Mail, an encrypted privacy-focused service, has introduced an AI-powered assistant called Proton Scribe to help compose, edit, proofread, and refine emails directly in the composer. It supports tone refinement, grammar checks, as well as shortening and formalizing text. Besides, Proton has a standalone AI assistant Lumo, that can help with writing emails, summarizing text, and other tasks, with encrypted handling and no data logged.
Yahoo Mail started rolling out AI Summaries and catch-up suggestions as part of a push to attract younger users and modernize its service last year. This was basically the first major update of the solution in the last decade.
Most email clients (apps you use to access multiple accounts) now also include or integrate AI tools, such as suggested message composition, smart replies, inbox categorization, and quick actions.
The bottom line is, the more customers an e-mail service provider has, the more advanced generative AI functions it starts to provide. As the space is quite monopolized, all the competitors quickly follow the lead, so that today basic AI tools are embedded in practically every e-mail solution on the market, and wider functions are highly expected.
One of the main issues with AI summarizing and assisting with e-mail communication is, of course, the privacy of that very communication. Though providers state they don’t use your inbox content to train public models, questions may remain, especially in the light of recent Amazon AI tool backlash, which again emphasized the need for clear opt-in policies for AI-related services.
