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Comment by mulderc | Hacker News Reader

For me, AI helping with writing email has been wonderful. I do a lot of email that is fairly generic and really just needs a basic template for replying or informing people. For those tasks it works great. I also had a more serious email that I wasn't sure how to respond to and needed to make sure the tone was appropriate and AI helped me get a good draft to work from.

Email is one of those things that I would put off as I just found it hard to get started and would worry about grammatical error and trivial mistakes that people seem to focus on more than they should. AI has helped me just be better at email.

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I imagine the value of this feature varies depending on how much email you send. If you only send one or two emails a day the value may not be obvious - if most of your job is email communication this could be a whole lot more impactful.

It is more about how much effort does email take for you. I don't do that much email but find the task unpleasant and more time-consuming than I would like. Letting and LLM give me a first draft to work from based on the email and a couple points I want to make in reply makes the whole process much easier and more enjoyable to me, and I don't have to worry as much about silly grammatical errors or other small mistakes.

I wonder how long it will take for the sort of tone this generates to become the baseline for what to avoid in high-volume email.

Out of curiosity, as a user, have you tried to get it to format an executive email?

My impression of LLM-generated emails has been they tend towards verbosity. At least relative to the minimal-characters some higher-role folks prefer.

I haven't spent much time trying to get them to exec memo edit/format information.

I usually give it a short draft or points to use and my experience is it usually gives a clear and concise email for me to then work with. You can always ask it to be shorter and see if it gets what you are looking for.

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