Shortwave is a Free Progressive Web application (PWA) for Chromium based browsers that provides a completely new smarter and faster experience for your GMail account. It has been powered by AI and revolutionizes your email experience in such a way that you truly start loving your inbox due to the way it has been organized.
Shortwave allows you to understand emails in any language as well as summarizes them using AI to capture the key points and save precious time. It provides built-in labels for common use cases to help you organize your emails in an easy and effortless way. Let’s briefly read through the features of Shortwave.
Features:
AI Summarization: Shortwave allows you to summarize any email using AI so that you can capture the key points rather than reading it entirely and save your valuable time. It also understands emails in any language since there are no barriers. You can send the AI generated summaries to others too even if that are not on Shortwave.
Natural Language Snooze: You can defer any email to a specified time directly from your keyboard by using natural language phrases like Tomorrow, Next week, Next weekend, Next Monday, Christmas 3 pm etc.
Work Prioritization: Using a technique called the Shortwave method you can prioritize your work and maintain zero inbox backlogs. Shortwave method comprises of two steps viz, clear out your emails and prioritize tasks, and then define rules to schedule your work so that decision fatigue can be reduced to a large extent. Click here to read more about this method.
Group emails: Emails from the same sender are automatically grouped in bundles making it very easy for you to handle your inbox as this results in very few clicks.
Labels: You can configure custom labels and apply them to specific senders to better organize and track your emails.
Batched delivery: This feature enables you to receive your emails when you actually want them. This reduces the interruptions in your work and improves your efficiency.
Reorder tasks: You can easily pin, reorder and combine emails using the drag and drop technique. This method of using your inbox as a to-do list will enhance your speed and efficiency of work.
Block senders: All spammy and noisy marketing / advertising emails can be blocked or unsubscribed with a single click.
Powerful search: You can find whatever you need any time by writing complex queries.
The free version of Shortwave limits the searchable email history to 90 days. Shortwave also offers paid plans which do not have this restriction and provide additional features. Click here to read more about them.
How it Works:
1. Navigate to Shortwave using the link that we have specified at the end of this article and register for a free account by clicking on ‘Sign in with Gmail’.
2. Sign in using your Google Credentials and grant the necessary permissions to Shortwave to access your Google account. You will be directly navigated to the Shortwave PWA on your browser tab.
3. The panel towards the left of the screen lists your mailboxes, labels and more and the viewport towards the right shows the grouped emails in the selected mailbox. Click on any thread and all the mails under the selected bundle will be shown in a pane towards the right. Next, when you click on any email in the thread, it opens on the right while collapsing the other panes on the left to automatically enlarge the screen size.
4. Observe that your email threads from the same sender are automatically bundled together. You can click on ‘Customize’ at the top of your inbox for further customization as to what type of emails you want to be grouped or bundled together in your inbox.
5. You can summarize any email that you open using AI by clicking on the corresponding icon at the top right as shown in the screenshot below.
6. To snooze any email, click on the ‘Clock’ icon at the top right and then click on any available choices or click on the ‘Calendar’ icon to specify a Date / Time of your choice. You can also type a natural language phrase to snooze your email such as 4 hours, next Wednesday, lunch etc. To mark a thread as done, click on the ‘tick mark’ icon at the top right.
7. If you desire to attach a custom label to any email, click on the 3-dots icon at the top right and choose ‘Label’. Select any of the labels from the available list or simply type the name of a label if you wish to create a new one.
8. The labels can be directly accessed by clicking on the corresponding link in the left panel and selecting the built-in or the custom labels to display all the emails that have been designated under that specific label.
9. To search for any email, use the search bar at the top of the interface. It allows you to construct complex search queries so that you can easily narrow down your search. To Compose a new email, click on the ‘Compose’ button at the bottom left.
10. To configure the options for Notifications, Appearance, Grouping and more, you can click on the ‘Settings’ icon at the top right of the window.
11. To configure Batched Delivery which controls the time when emails arrive in your inbox, click on ‘Notifications’ in the Settings window, enable ‘Availability’ and specify the date and time as per your requirements. This ensures that you are actually ready to handle the incoming emails once they start arriving and are not interrupted by non-urgent emails at other times.
Closing Comments:
Overall Shortwave is a fine Web Application to change and improvise the way you work with and handle emails in GMail. The AI enabled smart summary is very handy tool to go through the main points of any email in just a few sentences, while Batched delivery allows you to carry on your work without any interruption. I feel Shortwave organizes your emails in a better manner so as to streamline your work and brings some normalcy and order to the chaos of handling too many emails during work hours.
Click here to navigate to Shortwave.
