The Shortwave AI Assistant

A great executive assistant can supercharge your email productivity by handling tedious tasks and helping you stay organized. For most of us though, hiring an executive assistant has been sadly out of reach – until now!

The Shortwave AI Assistant is a conversational executive assistant built right into your email. Available on all platforms and plans, it can save you hours every week using cutting-edge LLMs with our powerful AI search infrastructure to bring you the smartest AI executive assistant on the planet.

Here's what it can do for you:

The AI Assistant is more than just a tool – it's your personal assistant who knows your preferences inside and out, so you can delegate the tedious work and focus on getting more done. Here’s a quick guide on how to make the most of it.

Access the AI Assistant anywhere

No matter what device, platform, or plan you're on, the AI Assistant is easily accessible from the bottom right of the app. On web / desktop, you can click the ✨Ask AI Anything button (shortcut Cmd J) to open the Assistant. On Android and iOS, you can tap the Shortwave logo in the bottom right of your navigation menu.

The AI Assistant understands and adapts to what's on your screen. If you have an email thread open, it can read and help you extract information from the thread. If you've started a draft, it knows that too and will suggest improvements like a personal editor. The AI can also look up additional information for you that may not be visible on the screen, such as historical emails, calendar information, and your settings.

Shortwave's AI Assistant offers automations for your most common AI workflows. You can use the instant reply suggestions visible at the bottom of a new message, spot-check your writing with the Improve draft button at the bottom of the compose box, or tap on a thread’s Instant Summary to get a more detailed overview. There are also contextual AI automations in the bottom right of the AI Assistant for tasks like drafting new emails, scheduling calendar events, and searching your emails (or the web), so you can get the results you need even faster.

Write better emails, faster

Need help crafting new emails, responding to complex threads, or overcoming blank page syndrome? Our AI Assistant is here to perfect your emails while maintaining your unique voice and writing style.

In addition to asking the AI Assistant to write specific content, you can use inline instant AI replies. With just one click, you get a complete, contextual draft that sounds exactly as if you had written it yourself. This feature isn't just another generic reply suggestion tool. The AI Assistant uses the full power of Ghostwriter–a Shortwave-only technology that understands how you write from past sent emails.

This means the Assistant always sounds like you, including using your exact phrases and getting the factual details correct. If you don't love the first draft, you can simply provide the Assistant follow-up clarifications or instructions, and watch as the AI refines your message to meet your exact needs.

Improve your existing draft

Shortwave's AI Assistant doesn't just help with new emails; it's also a pro at refining your existing drafts. Whether you need to proofread for grammar and spelling, complete partial drafts, or reword phrasing and tone, our AI Assistant can perfect your writing. For a quick spot check, there's even a built-in button "Improve draft" button in the compose box to polish your content and catch stray typos.

Like with Shortwave's other AI writing features, Ghostwriter powers draft improvement too. This means you get personalized recommendations that align with your unique writing style based on what it has learned from your past emails. One of Shortwave's most popular writing features is predictive AI autocomplete. This feature gives you smart, contextual, and personalized suggestions for how to continue your draft while composing. Just press Tab to accept the suggestions, and finish your draft as fast as you think it.

Search in plain language, get instant answers

By simply typing in plain language–the same way you speak or think–you can ask the AI Assistant complex questions and get precise answers without having to memorize obscure search syntax. Whether you're looking to retrieve specific information, find important emails, or just do some general research, our AI Assistant will get you answers instantly.

If you're looking for particular emails, our AI Assistant can help you locate them quickly. When searching for information from your email, the Assistant will list relevant threads along with an about:[topic] search button. Clicking that button displays a comprehensive list of relevant emails, making it easy to find exactly what you need.

You can also ask the AI Assistant any question, and it will provide you with an instant answer. This is perfect for general research or when you need to quickly extract information without sifting through emails.

With these two powerful search capabilities, our AI Assistant helps you get the information you need, exactly when you need it.

You can search using the same plain language via Shortwave’s search bar as well. The AI-powered ‘about:’ search query will quickly find emails with a simple description instead of exact keywords. Try searching for things like about:"rebrand project updates" or about:"pricing feedback" in lieu of typing into the AI Assistant “find emails about…” for natural language search.

Analyze & understand your emails

Shortwave's AI executive assistant is like having the full power of ChatGPT integrated directly into your email client, without the need to jump between apps to copy/paste text. It can do everything ChatGPT does, unlocking insights about any email on your screen or even analyzing multiple emails at once. Whether you need to extract important dates, identify action items, or get a quick summary of a lengthy thread, the AI Assistant can do it all for you from the comfort of your inbox.

View your calendar & schedule meetings with ease

In addition to managing your inbox, you can also manage your Google Calendar without needing to open another app. You can create a calendar invite yourself from scratch using the “Create event” button on web, or just tell the AI Assistant to create calendar invites and write scheduling emails for you.

You can also connect multiple calendars by sharing calendars with your signed-in email address. To further modify your calendar preference, you can configure your settings via Settings > Calendar.

On web and Android, you can also highlight any specific dates or times mentioned in an email, then tap 📅 Schedule with AI to create a calendar event.

Customize your AI Assistant

Fine-tune your new AI executive assistant to your specific needs and most common use cases via Settings > AI Assistant. When it comes to filling out these settings, the more specific you are, the better! Below is a quick rundown of each field with examples and best practices for filling them out.

Personalization

The first thing to do when customizing your AI Assistant is to fill out your job, company, and language information.

Your job & company

This field informs the AI Assistant of context including technical terms to use, relevant industry patterns, and modes of communication to follow.

Tips:

• The general format to follow is "<Your role> at <Company Name>"
• You can also provide a very short description of what your company does to help the AI Assistant have a better understanding of your job function
• Example: "Product Manager at Shortwave - an AI email productivity app"

Preferred language

Let the AI Assistant know what languages to respond in when answering questions or providing AI Autocomplete suggestions and Instant Summaries. If you don't specify a language, the AI Assistant defaults to English.

Tips:

• The general format to follow is "Primary language, Secondary language"
• When filling out your preferred languages, be sure to write them in their native language / characters
• When listing multiple languages, the first one listed will take precedence
• Example: "Español, 한국어, English"

Note: this setting does not apply to the Assistant's prompt suggestions, which default to English.

Advanced customization

You can supercharge your AI Assistant using advanced customization to save extra hours every week.

Custom AI automations

Automations let you create custom one-click AI commands for your most common actions. Set them up in the Assistant settings by choosing an emoji, naming your action, and defining your prompt. You can activate the automations from the bottom right of the AI Assistant on web and Android.

Tips:

• Toggle on “autosubmit” to give the exact command you have configured to the AI Assistant without having to hit enter
• Example: ☕ Coffee chat – "Schedule a 30-minute morning meeting with the recipient for a coffee chat"

Custom AI writing prompt

If you’re looking for additional control, you can customize the writing prompt used by the AI Assistant when drafting content. This is useful when you want to be explicit about exactly how it responds.

Tips:

• The general format to follow is a bulleted list "-Specific instruction 1 -Specific instruction 2 etc."
• Short and precise instructions tend to work best
• You can even instruct it to do things like always include your personal meeting link whenever it drafts a scheduling email for you, or to offer a specific promo code whenever a customer asks for a discount
• Example:
  - Start messages with 'Hey <FIRST_NAME>' and end with 'Fern' after a new line
  - Booking link: https://calendar.app.google/custom-meeting
  - Use a conversational tone, addressing the recipient by name

Custom proofreading prompt

This prompt enhances the Assistant's ability to tailor its suggestions to your specific needs, ensuring more personalized and accurate proofreading.

Tips:

• The general format to follow is a bulleted list "- Specific instruction 1 - Specific instruction 2 etc."
• Short and precise instructions tend to work best
• Example:
  - Edit for run on sentences
  - Fix grammar and spelling errors
  - Summarize the mistakes and changes made

FAQ

1. How does the AI Assistant work on a technical level?

   Here is a technical deep-dive on how the AI Assistant is built.

2. Are my emails used to train any AI models?

   No, your emails are not used in any training. Here are our AI security & privacy practices which explain how we protect your data and respect your privacy.

3. Why doesn’t the Assistant seem to understand all of the threads I have multi-selected?

   AI multi-select only supports up to 50 threads at this time due to technical constraints. If more than 50 threads are selected, the AI Assistant will only look at the 50 most recent threads in the selection.

4. Why can’t the AI Assistant identify important threads in my inbox (that need a reply)?

   The AI Assistant is designed to help with various tasks, but it currently does not have the capability to automatically identify important threads or things that need a reply. Use features like importance and create an Important split to quickly identify emails that need your attention.

5. Why does the AI Assistant respond that it can’t do something / give the wrong answer?

   While AIs are incredibly helpful for extracting important information quickly, they aren’t perfect. Occasionally, they can hallucinate and provide incorrect data or reply saying they’re unable to do something they actually can.

   There are known technical limitations across all AIs, such as:

   • Hallucinations where the AI makes up an answer
   • Complex queries that the AI is unable to handle
   • Vague or ambiguous instructions that lead to incorrect responses
   • Cut-off answers and drafts due to running out of tokens
   • Temporary issues (like OpenAI’s error 200) require waiting a moment and refreshing the app

   If the Assistant says it can’t do something that it obviously can (like search your email), try following up by saying "Yes, you can do <task>" or try re-wording your instructions. Clear and specific instructions can often resolve the issue.

   In case you encounter a serious issue or error, you can click “Provide feedback” via the AI Assistant and add a description of the problem to notify our support team. This helps us improve the AI and address any underlying issues promptly.