Do you want a chatbot to help you manage email overload?
That’s the question that Astro has to answer now that it’s officially launching on iOS and the Mac.
It’s the simplest, quickest way to describe what Astro offers today.
And when you put it that way, the answer is almost surely “no.” But
Astro has bigger ambitions than just cramming a chat interface into your
email. It has ambitions to become the default AI system that can talk
to all of your work software. It’s starting with email, but your
calendar, sales software, task management suite, and all the rest are
meant to come next.
But to start, Astro simply presents itself as a straight
forward email app that works well with both Office 365 and Gmail —
precisely the thing that umpteen, if not dozens of startups have tried
before. For Astro, getting a native mail client across Macs and iPhones
is just table stakes. But it has to get those stakes right where so many
others have not. So let’s start there.
Astro is a
native email app on Apple’s two main computing platforms, and it does
what most modern email apps ought to do: separates your email into two
groups (Priority and Other) and allows you to snooze emails until later.
It has a unified inbox, reminders, and a swiping interface for triaging
email. Astro will also allow attachments from multiple cloud storage
services and let you set notifications just for the priority inbox.
Those features alone put it in the right league — too
many apps only work on the phone but eschew the desktop, leaving Gmail
and Office 365 users with a confusing mess of folders.
But what the startup (which has employees who have worked
at companies like Zimbra, Asana, LinkedIn, and Google) hopes to do is
nail the fundamentals and then add in a chatbot that can use machine
learning to fix the sort of things other emails apps try to handle with
buttons and other user interface tricks.
Here’s the basic idea: instead of crafting your own
filters and carefully denoting VIP contacts, Astro will watch how you
use your email and its chatbot will try to anticipate your needs. Always
snooze emails from the family until the evening? Astro will offer to do
it automatically. You can tell it to clear out old emails, or remind
you to email your boss tomorrow. It can even scan your contact list and
map our who knows who (with some privacy protections) so that when you
want to get in touch with somebody, it can see who among your contacts
is the best person to make an introduction.
That’s the idea, anyway. The implementation isn’t quite
as elegant as the theory. Astro’s bot appears in a separate space from
your standard email tasks — gently offering suggestions when it has
them, eminently ignorable if you’re not interested.
It does attempt to call out specific emails that need
your attention. If somebody important (like, say, your boss) is asking
for something specific (like, say, that spreadsheet you promised) the
chatbot will call it out to you. It will take note of emails you
reflexively delete and ask if you just want to unsubscribe from the darn
things.
It’s gotten tiresome to hear about AI and Machine
Learning from companies both large and small. Even the big corporations
like Google and Microsoft don’t always get it right, so it’s fair to
take a skeptical stance when asking if a startup like Astro can pull it
off.
But the idea is sound: most modern workplaces
have important stuff scattered across multiple software systems: email,
calendar, Asana, Trello, FogBugz, SalesForce, Slack, you name it.
Increasingly, everybody has to manage a whole bunch of this stuff and
find a way to move conversations and ideas from one platform to the
next.
So what Astro is promising isn’t just a chatbot for
email, but an assistant that can eventually handle the cognitive load or
making sense of all of those different systems. It’s the sort of thing
Google is also talking about this week at its Google Cloud Next
conference, actually. Whoever figures it out first is going to be a big
winner, but nobody’s really close at all yet.
That’s why Astro is starting small — with the easily
mockable idea of a chatbot glommed on to an email client. Mock away, but
it’s a start. And Astro is slightly different from Google, Microsoft,
and Apple in this game: it’s willing to work across multiple software
platforms and be the glue between them rather than try to win it all
like G Suite, Office, and iCloud. That strategy worked pretty well for
Slack.
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