“Give me the 50k foot level on that topic.”
“Just give us the cliff notes.”
“Please give me the bird’s eye view.”
“Please give me the bird’s eye view.”
AI Email Thread Abstraction and Summarization
A daunting, and highly public email has landed in your lap..top to respond. The email thread goes between over a dozen people all across the globe. All of the people on the TO list, and some on the CC list, have expressed their points about … something. There are junior technical and very senior business staff on the email. I’ll need to understand the email thread content from the perspective of each person that replied to the thread. That may involve sifting through each of the emails on the thread. Even though the people on the emails are English fluent, their response styles may be different based on culture, or seniority of staff (e.g. abstractly written). Also, the technical folks might want to keep the conversation of the email granular and succinct.
Let’s throw a bit of [AI] automation at this problem.
Another step in our AI personal assistant evolution, email thread aggregation and summarization utilizing cognitive APIs | tools such as what IBM Watson has implemented with their Language APIs. Based on the documentation provided by their APIs, the above challenges can be resolved for the reader. A suggestion to an IBM partner for the Watson Cognitive cloud, build an ’email plugin’ if the email product exposes their solution to customization.
A plugin built on top of an email application, flexible enough to allow customization, may be a candidate for Email Thread aggregation and summarization. Email clients may include IBM Notes, Gmail, (Apple) Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo! Mail, and OpenText FirstClass.
Add this capability to the job description of AI assistants, such as Cortana, Echo, Siri, and Google Now. In fact, this plug-in may not need the connectivity and usage of an AI assistant, just the email plug-in interacting with a suite of cognitive cloud API calls.
AI Document Abstraction and Summarization
A plug in may also be created for word processors such as Microsoft Word. Once activated within a document, a summary page may be created and prefixed to the existing document. There are several use cases, such as a synopsis of the document.
With minimal effort from human input, marking up the content, we would still be able to derive the contextual metadata, and leverage it to create new sentences, paragraphs of sentences.
Update:
I’ve not seen an AI Outlook integration in the list of MS Outlook Add-ins that would bring this functionality to users.
