Shortwave

It's Monday morning and you've got a few hundred unread threads. Newsletters, calendar pings, a vendor invoice, two customer escalations buried somewhere in the middle. In Shortwave you don't scroll through that pile. You type a prompt asking the agent to surface what actually needs a reply, and it identifies important emails and todos "with a single click" while bundles sweep promotions, newsletters and updates out of the way. Then you set up an AI filter in plain English, something like "star anything from a customer domain that mentions billing," so next Monday starts cleaner. That triage loop is the core of the product, and it's where Shortwave is most convincing.

The rest of the app builds outward from that inbox. The writing assistant learns your voice from the emails you've sent, autocomplete pulls real links and facts from your email history, and the scheduling assistant can check your availability, create calendar events and draft the back-and-forth email. AI search goes beyond finding a thread: it can analyze your team's emails and attachments to answer a question. Integrations with Slack, Calendar, Notion, Asana and HubSpot mean the agent can act outside email too. Under the hood, the pricing page says you're getting Anthropic models, from Claude Haiku 4.5 at the basic level up to Claude Opus 4.6 at the Expert level on the Max plan. The team was founded by ex-Googlers, and press coverage calls it the spiritual successor to Google Inbox. Testimonials lean on the same idea: "all the things you wish Gmail did."

Teams get real collaboration: shared live threads, private comments on emails, assigned owners with a team-wide done status, and shared labels that become an AI-searchable archive. The catch is cost and caps. Individual plans start at $9/mo, but business seats run $30, $45 or $120 per month, and features like AI filters and threads per AI search are metered by tier. If you want true 24/7 automation, that lives in a separate sister product, Tasklet. Shortwave is a strong pick if email is your main work surface and you'll actually use the AI daily. If you just want a tidier inbox, the free tier may be all you need.