shortwave

An AI-native email client designed to enhance productivity with advanced AI features and real-time collaboration for Gmail users.

Shortwave

This right here is Shortwave. It's an email app that uses artificial intelligence. It wants you to manage your emails and use artificial intelligence at the same time to help you to do things faster. Today we're going to review it and see whether it's suitable for you, looking at the features, pros, and cons of Shortwave.

Hello everyone. If you're new here, my name is Franchesco Delesio and welcome to the channel. Shortwave is an interesting application. It is essentially an email app that allows you to do more artificial intelligence assistant features like search a inbox and also use it to create events that you can use to schedule meetings with other people. It also allows you to naturally summarize emails, create to-dos, and much more.

We're going to dive into it over on the laptop and explore whether it's suitable for you. So here we are with Shortwave, and very simply this application wants to manage your emails. So at its purpose, it's an email client. Now I'm going to show you a few of the features.

Going to dive into the pros and then the cons and then just wrap things up. So as you can see, this is what it looks like when you get started. Um, there's a sort of Chrome extension that you can download or install. Um, it's sort of like a just a quick access uh app that available on Chrome. It's not really a fully downloadable Mac or Windows app, but it will help you to use it faster. 

I'm actually just browsing this through the web, which is pretty much the same experience. Now I think there's a feature that I need to mention straight away about this. Although it's an inbox ability in terms of like an inbox management system uh that you can connect with Google and uh Google workspace, it also has some other abilities. But you can also manage your to-dos here and it's very interesting because you can convert any of your inbox items over to your to-dos area. 

So for example, this all I have to do is go up to here. I can either press t or press this icon and what it does is it uses a little bit of um generative AI to create a title for this email. And that's quite nice because it's like check the same box folder. So it reads the email, understands it, and allows me to add the task. 

Now what is really nice if I go over to the to-dos.

Area um it's a little bit um I found it uh it's a little bit um difficult sometimes to switch between these two um but you can see that the task is here and the entire thread is available here. 

If I go back I can take this item off I want to and I can see that the email inbox is done. That I think is a killer feature for a lot of people. It separates it slightly when it comes to managing your inbox. 

Now if you go to settings you can see that I'm on the free plan. This essentially is connected up with a Google workspace account as you can see here. I can connect up my other Google workspace accounts uh which is something you can do. You can also make it to your mail app uh default. 

Now as you can see there are some additional features um and you can see that there are downloads for the desktop but they're not really as I said uh there isn't like a Mac app. As you can see you can see the sort of guidance here but if I wanted to upgrade I'm going to have to see the pricing here. 

And as you can see monthly it's in the realm of superum. You can see here that uh it's everything in personal which is available here but because I've connected a Gmail uh a Google workspace account it means that I'm automatically unable to get a.

Personal account because that's suited for gmail.com or edu email addresses. So you can see here that with this Pro experience that is monthly obviously cheaper annually. I get the pro features for up to three signed in accounts. So that means it does have the ability to unify your inbox a little bit more. You can also see that you get three years of powerful AI search which to be honest is as much as you need. 

And the AI writing style feature there is additional abilities here for business plans for $30 per month which gives you 5 years custom AI prompts and read statuses if you do want them. The annual pricing as you can see is $14 per user per month billed annually. So now we got that out the way let's show you some of the features. 

And I think one of the first things you can do that's quite impressive is the bundling. This helps you split up your inboxes and you can set up custom bundling as well that helps you to create certain splits. This is something you see inside of apps like superhuman and you can change what those bundles look like and set up contact bundles for specific types of people as well. 

Now it has a few customizations and to be honest using it was fairly easy. There are system based ones or dark.

And light modes and also there's accent colors that are available in the upgrade pricing. Now in terms of customizations, there's markdown shortcuts, um, some signatures, but obviously managed through the likes of Gmail. And there's an AI assistant which is fairly impressive. 

And I'll show you some of the abilities you can access. The AI system over on the right hand side and you can do something like write an email. For example, here's some of the prompts that you can go with: write an email to John Smith to confirm our meeting on Friday. And obviously it's going to start drafting that email for you. 

Now what is nice is you can start by pressing insert into new email, which will save you a bit of time prepping that initial email and getting it set up. Now inside this email, you can do things like send later, send and remind, as well as all of the regular attachment things, as well as AI autocomplete, which is naturally locked under the premium but will allow you to utilize that feature. 

This, this that I just selected is grammar, so that is not what you will be getting. If you're using this, that is a Chrome extension that I have. Now, as you can see, what I quite liked about this up here is you can see that you can see an outline of.

Your day and this is really nice because if you want to create an event you can instantly do it. You can go up here and add the conferencing detail as well which I found to be quite easy when playing around with this. You can also do things like press this calendar mode up here and type in help me schedule now. For example you can say help me schedule a call with Sarah for Monday at 2 p.m.

And what it will do is it'll create almost a calendar event for you. This is perfect for instantly creating and you can see that it's connected to my Google Calendar, which means that it's going to instantly create or I can go and edit this instantly in the likes of uh edit in Google. So it just takes me out to Google. 

So I really like that feature. There's also a find email feature. For example, you could ask it find emails from marketing team and naturally you can find emails from marketing team that are relevant and it will bring them up. Now, of course, that's some of them are locked under the premium in terms of the enhanced AI search, but you can see that it is quite a helpful function to have that on the right hand side as you're browsing. 

Now you can ask anything as well and you can go and see previous prompts as well, which is quite helpful. You can also make it smaller and bigger on this side. 

So in terms of the pros of using this application, I found that it was fast and easy to use when being able to quickly open stuff and be able to write emails back. I found that I had no problem using things like done opening things up and the mobile applications were fast as well. I think that the to-do function.

Is probably one of the power features that really doesn't really go uh well. It needs to go notice because it's a very impressive feature. But it doesn't really have anything that is hideously different from some of the other emo apps like SparkMail on the market. Although I would say that the calendar open uh the abilities to create calendar rent is really impressive. The labels and functions are easily being able to modify in terms of rules and bundling. 

I really did like the fact that you can modify your search um in the sort of detail in terms of the queries uh that I just showed you in a moment ago. You can also set up delivery schedules as well, which allows you to set up uh and when certain things come into your inbox. This allows better for those travel emails or calendar emails and newsletter emails to land at a certain time when you approaching them right. 

But this really is a SparkMail competitor with slightly better artificial intelligence features and will help you to enhance how you're using email. I'm excited to see what the desktop versions look like and excited to see what Shortwave bring to the future of email.

Note, that there may be slight differences in text and video. Watch video for the original content.

Shortwave Video