Shortwave

Shortwave is a revolutionary email client built from the ground up with AI at its core. Developed by a team of ex-Googlers, it serves as the spiritual successor to Google Inbox, aiming to solve the universal problem of email overload. Shortwave transforms your Gmail inbox into a smart, organized, and collaborative hub. It's not just another email app with AI features sprinkled in; it's an agentic AI designed for deep human-AI collaboration, empowering ambitious professionals and teams to be truly epic in their inboxes.

The platform is designed to bring order to chaos, allowing you to focus on what truly matters. It intelligently categorizes emails, summarizes long threads, and helps you draft perfect replies in your own voice. Whether you're a solo professional trying to conquer a mountain of emails or a team needing to streamline communication, Shortwave provides the tools to make email less of a chore and more of a powerful productivity driver.

How to use Shortwave

Getting started with Shortwave involves adopting a simple yet powerful workflow known as the 'Shortwave Method' to efficiently manage your inbox.

1. Triage Everything First: The core principle is to process every item in your inbox in a single pass. For each email, decide immediately whether it's non-actionable, a quick task, or a larger actionable item. Avoid leaving read emails in the inbox.

2. Clear Non-Actionable Items: Use Shortwave's powerful features to quickly clear out clutter. Mark emails as 'Done' to archive them. Use 'Snooze' for messages you need to address later. Leverage 'Bundles' to group newsletters, promotions, and updates, allowing you to archive dozens of emails with a single click.

3. Handle If a reply or action takes less than two minutes, do it right away. Use Shortwave's 'Instant AI replies' to draft contextual responses in one click, preventing small tasks from piling up.

4. Organize Actionable Tasks: For emails that require more significant work, turn them into trackable tasks directly within Shortwave. Use 'Stars' for lightweight tasks that need to stay top-of-mind. For larger projects or multi-thread tasks, convert them into 'Todos', which you can rename, group, and prioritize.

5. Prioritize and Execute: After triaging, your inbox will contain only a clean, prioritized list of tasks. Drag and drop your starred items and todos to order them by priority, giving you a clear plan for your work.

Core Features of Shortwave

• AI Email Assistant: An agentic AI that helps with summarizing long threads (tl;dr), drafting replies in your learned voice and style, and analyzing attachments (PDFs, text files, etc.).
• AI-Powered Search: Go beyond keyword search. Use natural language to find emails, documents, and answers buried within your team's entire email history.
• Intelligent Inbox Organization: Automatically group related emails like newsletters and promotions into 'Bundles'. Use 'Splits' to create custom tabs for important senders, labels, or queries.
• AI Automation & Filters: Create custom AI filters using plain English to automatically label, archive, or delete incoming mail. Automate complex workflows without leaving your inbox.
• Team Collaboration: Share live email threads with a unique URL. Discuss emails privately with team comments (@-mentions), assign emails to specific owners, and track progress with a team-wide 'done' status.
• Productivity Tools: Get read statuses and link tracking on sent emails. Use smart 'Snippets' as shared team templates. Set automatic follow-up reminders so you never drop the ball.
• Seamless Scheduling: Ask the AI to check your availability, create calendar events, and draft scheduling emails, all from a simple prompt.

Use Cases for Shortwave

For Ambitious Professionals: Manage high email volume with ease. Get instant AI summaries of long discussions to get up to speed quickly. Use AI writing to maintain a professional tone and save time on drafting responses.

For Sales and Client-Facing Teams: Track engagement with read statuses and link tracking. Use follow-up reminders to stay on top of leads. Leverage shared templates (Snippets) for consistent and efficient client communication.

For Operations and Support Teams: Use shared labels and assignees to manage a team inbox effectively. Ensure every inquiry has a clear owner and is tracked to completion. Use private comments to collaborate on responses before sending.

For Founders and Executives: Get a high-level overview of communications without getting bogged down in details. Use AI search to find critical information across the company's email archive. Delegate tasks by assigning emails directly to team members.

Advantages of Shortwave

AI-Native Design: Unlike competitors that add AI as an afterthought, Shortwave is built around AI, leading to a more integrated and powerful user experience.

Time-Saving Efficiency: Features like bundles, AI summaries, and one-click triage are designed to help users reach 'inbox zero' in a fraction of the time.

Personalized Experience: The AI learns your unique writing style, tone, and even facts about you, allowing it to generate emails that sound genuinely like you.

Unified Collaboration Hub: It seamlessly blends email management with team collaboration, eliminating the need to paste screenshots into Slack or other chat apps.

Cross-Platform Availability: Work from anywhere with full-featured apps for iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and the web.

Pricing and Plans

Shortwave operates on a freemium model, offering a 14-day free trial for its premium features.

• Free Plan: A basic plan is available for individuals, likely with limitations on search history and AI feature usage.
• Business Plan: Starting at $24/seat/month (billed annually), this plan includes standard AI intelligence (Claude 3.5 Haiku), 5 years of AI search history, 50 threads per AI search, and 3 AI-powered filters.
• Premier Plan: At $36/seat/month (billed annually), this popular plan offers advanced intelligence (Claude 4 Sonnet), unlimited AI search history, 100 threads per AI search, 10 AI filters, and smarter AI answers with 2x context tokens.
• Max Plan: For $100/seat/month (billed annually), users get the most powerful models (Claude 4 Opus), 150 threads per AI search, 50 AI filters, and live 1:1 training.
• Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing is available for larger organizations requiring advanced security, compliance, and support.