Do you want a chatbot to help you manage email overload?

Thats the question that Astro has to answer now that its officially launching on iOS and the Mac. Its 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. Its 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 Exchange 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 lets start there.

Astro is a native email app on Apples 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 Exchange 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.

Heres 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.

Thats the idea, anyway. The implementation isnt quite as elegant as the theory. Astros bot appears in a separate space from your standard email tasks gently offering suggestions when it has them, eminently ignorable if youre 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.

Its gotten tiresome to hear about AI and Machine Learning from companies both large and small. Even the big corporations like Google and Microsoft dont always get it right, so its fair to take a skeptical stance when asking if a startup like Astro can pull it off.

An AI for all your work software is a genuinely good idea

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 isnt just a chatbot for email, but an assistant that can eventually handle the cognitive load or making sense of all of those different systems. Its 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 nobodys really close at all yet.

Thats why Astro is starting small with the easily mockable idea of a chatbot glommed on to an email client. Mock away, but its a start. And Astro is slightly different from Google, Microsoft, and Apple in this game: its 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.

See the rest here:

Astro aims to fix your email mess with an AI chatbot - The Verge