Shortwave is an AI-powered email client built by ex-Googlers that aims to replace and improve upon the traditional Gmail experience. The product centers on an AI agent that can organize inboxes, write emails in the user's voice, search across team emails and attachments, schedule calendar events, and automate workflows through integrations with tools like Slack, Notion, Asana, and HubSpot. Users can create custom AI filters written in plain English to automatically label, star, and archive messages, and the platform offers autocomplete suggestions drawn from email history.

Beyond AI features, Shortwave provides a suite of productivity tools including split inbox tabs, email bundling for bulk triage, delivery scheduling, read receipts, link tracking, and comprehensive keyboard shortcuts. For teams, the platform supports real-time collaboration with shared threads, private commenting, task assignment, shared labels, and shared prompts. The product also integrates with a sister product called Tasklet for 24/7 workflow automation, enabling automatic reply drafting and connections to over 3,000 apps.

Shortwave is available across iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows, and meets CASA Tier 2 compliance for enterprise security. The product has garnered attention from publications like the New York Times and The Verge, and counts professionals from companies like Foursquare, Y Combinator, and Twilio among its users.

Google's Gemini has introduced an AI Inbox feature that processes users' entire email history — summarizing threads, answering questions about years of archived messages, and learning to mimic individual writing styles. According to Sooraj (@iAnonymous3000), the feature goes further by explicitly inferring personal relationships from message content and constructing a behavioral model of users based on their communication patterns.

This development raises significant privacy and surveillance concerns, as it means an AI system is actively analyzing intimate communication data at scale to build detailed profiles of how people write, who they interact with, and how those relationships function. The post highlights the growing tension between AI-powered convenience and the depth of personal data these tools consume to deliver it.