At one point I got weekly project updates from a team I was working with, and one guy wrote dense, short, emails where I would have to read every sentence carefully to get a hang on what was going on. Another guy would write longer, fluffier emails but with bullet points and paragraphs in the same order:
> Hi everyone!
> {fluff}
> {general status}
>
> - Bullet points of things done that week
> {comment about things done}
>
> - Bullet points of things to do next week
> {comment about potential problems etc}
>
> {fluff}
> {annoyingly long footer}
Just by parsing the number of bulletpoints, and the length of each bullet point (and the first word) I would get a surprisingly good grasp on how things were going, and what was hard/complicated (longer bullet point -> more complex), and very easy to read about exactly I wanted to know.
- Sutras solved the problem to retaining large chunks of knowledge.
- Sutras had formal rules to keep the meaning unambiguous.
- Sutras were written by the sages who had lot of knowledge and control over language.
-Sutras were written in Sanskrit. A highly malleable (due to SANDHI and SAMAS) yet a precise language.
- English is not the right language to write tersely.
With colleagues I guess a style that helps to cut down on questions like the one you described is inferior.
(1) sometimes a BIT of a personal touch goes a long way
(2) even in the examples you give it misses potentially important context. Eg In the board message example, it removes a reminder of the topics. How could you know those weren't necessary? Why is the number of members what it included?
Just doesn't seem ready for prime-time for this use.
My preference would be having it suggest shorter versions of each paragraph inline or something.
I actually got myself into trouble a couple of years back because of this. I've been working with Norwegians almost my whole working life, and am used to being terse, direct and honest. Aside from that, I'm an extrovert, and don't talk unless I have something to say.
Anyway, then I got placed as tech lead for a UK project, working remotely. Within a week, the PM had made a complaint to my manager that I was being glib and not listening to other points of view.
I had no clue where any of this had come from, and sat down with the PM to try to understand - if I'd given the wrong impression, I wanted to fix it. Anyway, we looked back through piles of emails, and in every single case it was a misunderstanding of my real intentions that was directly linked to terseness.
From then on I've tried to gauge my audience better - always using salutations, using longer sentences to say the same thing, trying to be softer etc. I think by and large this has been successful, although I am finding recently my emails tend to be too long...
Just doesn't seem ready for prime-time for this use. I like the idea of this product but sometimes a BIT of a personal touch goes a long way. My preference would be having it suggest shorter versions of each paragraph inline or something. Eg In the board message example, it removes a reminder of the topics. How could you know those weren't necessary?
There are some interesting studies showing short emails perform better but we haven't found that to be true it seems the message is the biggest factor. Some way to improve the message is even more valuable but also likely a much harder ML task
I'd love to test it on more marketing emails, or content marketing -- these seem to be the two applications with the most direct ROI.
For example, the "really" in "really appreciate" isn't useful.
Also the last sentence in the "summarized" version reads: "If for any reason you haven't let, let me know..." I would also that that the "for any reason" is not useful, it is again implied.
You don't need "by now", it is implied.
The statements "That's nice." and "That's really, truly nice." give off very different messages.
One of them I'm not even sure if you're being short or dismissive/not interested, and I have to do mental gymnastics to figure out what the underlying tone is.
Just one or two words makes a massive (see what I did there) difference in tone + perception.
This is half the reason why it's hard working remotely. I put so much effort into being overly polite/nice with tone because you lose out on all other social cues and it's easy to mistake an ambiguous message.
It's also deleted the important part of a sentence actually requesting feedback whilst retaining the largely content-free 'We're working hard to make life easier for developers and site owners' clause.
And if it was a human editing, I'd expect them to concatenate 'Thanks for joining' and 'I really appreciate you signing up' into 'Thanks for signing up' long before they started deleting links...
I think there's massive potential in the idea, but I'd hope at least the demo video could show something which is more tersely written and easier to read, rather than something which is merely shorter and less useful. That said, I might install it anyway since I can always reject edits I don't like.
If you're talking about https://www.gkogan.co/blog/increase-reply-rates/, this was a primary inspiration for this project -- I even stole the name ;)
Would be cool to use this tool to read less of incoming email and then dig deeper if I think it's worth it.
I do have a generic popup that you can to summarize any passage, so you could copy-paste some long passage (email, article) to piggy back on the functionality. But it isn't tightly integrated into the Gmail UI as of now.
[1] https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/bart
Too often, after reading a blog post, I feel like it was a waste of time. I'd prefer to read a super dense summary first. Then optionally select longer variants before reading the full thing.
Maybe There could be a compress function [1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, ...]. Choose the compression level before reading.
Especially with books. I'm not sure how well this could work, but I'd prefer to read 100 books that way first, before deciding on the few I actually want to read.
I'd totally pay for this.
Edit: I should be clearer, I believe that the solution shown here does not have this capability, and the effort of using ML to do message summarization is flawed in the general case.
A human can read the shorter summary and add personal touches as they wish, but the first pass of what the model considers to be extraneous is interesting by itself.
I just put in a 300 word personal email and it spit out a 60 word summary that actually did extract the one concrete piece of news I was sharing, and just cut everything else. That's not precisely what I wanted in this case, but it wasn't a bad guess at all.
Side note: just finished a rewatch of Silicon Valley, I like that the sample text is from someone at Hooli, I wonder if it will change my .... to ... :)
As an FYI, some bad English on the Hooli Onboarding Email example:
If for any reason you haven't let, let me know and I'll make sure you get them.These are the same problems as always-on corporate instant messaging platforms, just slightly improved by the cross-organizational functionality and store-and-forward.
IMHO organizations should strive to make email less like instant messaging and more like letters. Fully formed thoughts distributed less frequently and with more purpose.
In short, tax hassling others.
I think the most interesting part of this problem is the ambiguity in desired result. Emails are inherently unstructured text data, which results in conflict about how people want them to look like.
For the design of this tool, it was important for me to "not get in the way" if you're already writing a short email. That's why I designed the widget so that it will only appear in your gmail window if you go over 100 words. It can serve solely as a "reminder" for the rare cases you might go over... almost like a training to help you form short email habits over time.
I kind of think we'd have to poll the recipients, not the author, for that sort of analysis.
I find myself trimming down lengthy emails frequently. Not because the information is excessive or irrelevant, but because I know most people in most contexts tend to not read or engage with lengthy emails. Myself included.
It has actually backfired on me in the past: because I didn't define and explain the entire space of the matter at hand, I was overcome by other arguments or ideas that I'd already considered and dismissed. That led to followup discussions that didn't need to occur.
It seems that context matters, sometimes long-form is better.
The problem seems to be that it's a judgement call - and I'm not exactly sure of all factors/variables that are involved in that judgement call. The subject at hand, the audience, the depth of the e-mail thread to which you're replying, time-sensitivity of the subject, etc. - they all play a role. But my default position tends to be that I'll save time explaining in future e-mails by providing all relevant details at hand now.
However, I also write emails to reduce time spent in conversation, so while I have learned to be more terse, when I'm not, it's to provide references so that I can shorten or preclude a conversation.
An ML email shortener is a fantastic idea for business comms, with the caveat that short email culture can also reward vagueness.
I would pay money for a tool that checks my technical writing for reading level and warns me when passages go above Nth grade. Most people in the US graduate high school with an 8th grade reading level, and some people may not be able to read above a 5th grade level. That means tiny words and short sentences are king.
There are also metrics for clarity and simplicity that proxy on number of syllables. Those are really useful and don't require a complex ML model.
Actually, now that I think about it... this might be a good source for bootstrapping further training data.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabi...
Joking aside - this is a great tool in corporate settings. In technology, one works with two types: Very verbose (tend to be introvert or detail oriented) or Too abbreviated. I cannot stand reading detailed accounts - and this could add to many professionals comprehending more.
Just guessing: SMMRY or Quillbot with a little enhancement to preserve the salutation?
[1] https://ai.facebook.com/research/publications/bart-denoising...