Pictured above: Founder Atif Siddiqi
Humans have come a long way from scratching images onto rocks, but to serial entrepreneur Atif Siddiqi and founder of GlanceAt, email is just not smart enough.
“The way we look at email is its something that’s been ported over from letter writing to the desktop and then we took the desktop rules and put it on mobile, when mobile is a completely different interaction paradigm,” said Siddiqi.
Smart phones make our lives easier, but they also complicate things. For Siddiqi, problems like missed important messages and events that weren’t properly put into a calendar were all too pervasive in his work life. His company GlanceAt is betting they are pervasive in your life too.
Streamlining Email
Mobile email is “this ubiquitous, really low friction platform, so let’s figure out ways to make it better,” said Siddiqi.
From his frustrations came an app that sits on top of your mobile email provider to streamline tasks and make your life easier.
To make email smarter, GlanceAt took a novel approach. The team, made up of mostly USC business school grads, used their AI, natural language and data science backgrounds to create a tool to simplify emails. “We made a choice not to be the default email client. [We thought] it would be cool if something just lived on top of your mailbox and provided you with a smart assistant, by using natural language processing and machine learning,” said Siddiqi.
GlanceAt does exactly that. Users continue checking their email provider of choice, but GlanceAt helps filter and respond to important emails. “We show you the relevant information that you need to get from an email in a glance,” said Siddiqi. For example, an email discussing a recent memo, gossiping about the newly-hired assistant, and asking for a meeting at 3pm on Wednesday, pulls the relevant-actionable information for you to glance at (the meeting on Wednesday), checks your calendar, and if you are busy, provides alternatives for you to suggest.
It’s streamlining and suggestion tools like these that GlanceAt thinks will save users time and minimize frustrations. The team is starting with high frequency requests that business people are inundated with and unbundles that into a prescriptive workflow. Basically, it takes a bunch of clunky steps and turns it into an easy click.
Natural Language and Machine Learning
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The program uses natural language and machine learning to ensure that GlanceAt doesn't make users sound like robots. Automatically crafted emails integrate user’s own language patterns; the more users engage with the program, the better it gets. It can also distinguish between emails to a colleague and those to a boss (there’s a lot of science behind this idea). Still, the focus is on work emails, not personal life. The focus is to develop a tool for “professional and the things they find really cumbersome and clunky throughout their day to day,” said Saddiqi.
Natural language and machine learning take email to a higher level. “We think we can really take something that’s inherently dumb like email and make it smarter using some data behind it,” said Saddiqi. For users, that means less time checking email and more time doing…well, whatever they want.
10,000 Strong
GlanceAt says the feedback from beta users has been great. If the waitlist to join is any indication (it is over 10,000 people long), buzz is building. GlanceAt takes user feedback to build out new smart cards for work scenarios: their latest deals with conference calls (every office worker’s favorite topic).
The team plans to bring the app out of beta early in 2015 and is hoping to get it into as many hands as possible.
Time at the IdeaLab helped validate the idea and showed the team that their product should be on top of existing email services, not try to replace it.
