In addition to shortening threads, another extremely cool trick coming to Shortwave is the ability to process attachments. Shortwave co-founder and CEO Andrew Lee tells Digital Trends that the summarization system will soon be able to handle threads as well. Sometimes, you enter a conversation after a healthy bunch of emails has already been shared, and you wish that Shortwave could summarize the entire thread, instead of having to shorten every single email one by one.īut there’s some good news here. But there’s one feature that I wish Shortwave had.

In my case, I didn’t use the AI summarizer for such scenarios because I do want to go through each answer that I sought from the recipient. This is a tad risky, especially if some of the questions needed short “yes” or “no” answers, but held a lot of significance to the conversation. Let’s say you sent over a series of questions and got the answers, only to find that the AI-generated summary glossed over some of those answers.

The feature is also limited by its very fundamental nature - i.e., shortening walls of text into a sweet, short paragraph. Some hiccups, but a bright future Nadeem Sarwar / DigitalTrends From product launch news and marketing emails to full-fledged email conversations with science experts, Shortwave’s AI summarizer again did an impressive job at capturing the core essence of the conversation. Next, I turned my attention to email formats. Where it falters is language loaded with colloquial terms and local phrases, which the AI tries to translate directly instead of understanding the true meaning. With some help from a professor, I also tested it with Persian and got a thumbs-up from him regarding the accuracy and abstract flow.

It’s worth pointing out that the translation and summary weren’t incorrect, but I occasionally got AI-generated synopses in which the last sentence was incomplete. The model is occasionally altered with languages in which the script is written from right to left, instead of left to right, like in English. I tried sending emails with the content written in Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic - and got nearly accurate summaries of the text body. Another noteworthy aspect is that the system also does the job of translation and then presents the summary in English.

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