Streamlining Email Workflows: The Power of Language Models for Email Response
Tags: ai, productivity, communication
Published: 2023-10-09 03:41:58

---
title: Streamlining Email Workflows: The Power of Language Models for Email Response
published: true
description: A look into how language models can transform our email communication.
tags: ai, productivity, communication
cover_image: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1512626120412-faf41adb4874?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&w=2000&fit=max&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjExNzczfQ
---

## The Overwhelming Burden of Email Overload

Most people today spend a substantial portion of their day dealing with work email. A [recent study](https://www.adp.com/spark/articles/2022/07/email-statistic.aspx) found that the average office worker sends 121 emails per day and receives even more at 206. With this deluge of messages, critical information often gets buried or overlooked.

The constant pressure to promptly respond leads to hours lost in email composition. Even brief messages require focused thought to craft the perfect reply. Finding the right tone and language for sensitive topics proves especially challenging. This inefficient process drains time that could be better spent on high-value projects.

## Language Models to the Rescue 

Language models leverage massive datasets and machine learning algorithms to generate amazingly human-like text. Tools like [GPT-3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3) have mastered the nuances of written communication. When applied to email, they can deliver significant advantages:

### Lightning Fast Responses

Language models can instantly create well-formed email replies after analyzing the content and context of incoming messages. Whereas manually drafting thoughtful responses requires extensive effort and time, language models can produce them in seconds. This allows dramatically faster turnaround on all email communication.

### Consistent and Professional Tone

Maintaining a consistent tone in all outgoing emails is challenging but critical for professionalism. Language models reliably adhere to the desired voice and style guidelines. This builds trust and authority by presenting a unified brand image across all electronic correspondence.

### Personalized Communication

With the proper customization, language models can generate emails tailored to each recipient. Personalized email performs better across metrics like open rate, click rate, and conversion rate. Language models make incorporating personal touches easy.

### Overcoming Writer's Block 

Even experienced writers occasionally struggle to get started with a dreaded blank page. Language models can provide pre-written introductions, bulleted outlines, or sample paragraphs to kickstart the creative process and overcome writer's block.

### Summarizing Long Conversations

When replying to a lengthy email chain, relevant context can be lost. Language models excel at summarizing main discussion points and history to keep everyone on the same page.

### Multilingual Capabilities

For global businesses, language models can translate correspondence or suggest region-specific phrasing. This facilitates relationship building across geographies and cultures. 

### Suggesting Improvements

Language models can rephrase sentences to enhance clarity, provide vocabulary recommendations, and ensure proper grammar and spelling. This polish elevates the quality of outgoing communication.

### Categorizing Inbound Emails 

Language models can organize inbound emails by priority, required action, sender, topic, and more. This allows efficiently routing messages to the appropriate staff.

### Automating Repetitive Replies

Language models shine at handling high volumes of repetitive inquiries, such as shipping status requests or password resets. This frees up worker bandwidth for complex issues.

## Best Practices for Implementation

To maximize the power of language models for email, consider these tips:

- Provide clear instructions on the desired tone, length, and purpose of the generated response.

- Thoroughly review all automated replies before sending to catch any errors.

- Start slowly by targeting high volume repetitive tasks to build trust. 

- Adjust confidence thresholds to balance automation with human oversight.

- Integrate language models directly into existing tools like Gmail for seamless adoption.

- Continuously train the models on company email data to improve accuracy over time.

## The Future of AI Email Assistants

Leading technology providers like Microsoft and Google are racing to incorporate language model capabilities into their popular email platforms. The rise of AI promises to fundamentally transform email productivity. 

With their ability to completely automate mundane tasks, apply complex contextual understanding across exchanges, and deliver consistently high-quality responses, language models offer immense potential to streamline workflows. Adoption is increasingly a competitive necessity.

By leveraging these AI tools, both individual users and organizations can reclaim hours lost in managing overflowing inboxes. The future of intelligent and automated email response is quickly emerging. Language models promise to revolutionize how we communicate.


## How to use Google Apps Script with OpenAI for Email Autoreply

Google Apps Script is a powerful scripting language that can be used to automate tasks in a variety of Google products, including Gmail. OpenAI is a research lab that has developed a number of powerful AI models, including GPT-3, which can be used to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content, and answer your questions in an informative way.

By combining Google Apps Script and OpenAI, you can create an autoreply for emails that is personalized and informative. To do this, you will need to create a Google Apps Script project and then write a script that calls the OpenAI API to generate an email response.

Here are the steps involved:

1. Create a new Google Apps Script project.
2. In the script editor, paste the following code:

   ```javascript
   function generateAutoreply(email) {
     // Get the OpenAI API key from the script properties.
     var apiKey = ScriptApp.PropertiesService.getScriptProperties().getProperty('OPENAI_API_KEY');
   
     // Create a new OpenAI request.
     var request = UrlFetchApp.fetch('https://api.openai.com/v1/engines/davinci/completions', {
       method: 'post',
       headers: {
         'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + apiKey
       },
       payload: JSON.stringify({
         prompt: 'Write an email autoreply for the following email:\n\n' + email.getBody()
       })
     });
   
     // Parse the OpenAI response.
     var response = JSON.parse(request.getContentText());
   
     // Return the generated autoreply.
     return response.choices[0].text;
   }
   
   function onMessageReceived(e) {
     // Get the email message.
     var email = e.message;
   
     // Generate an autoreply for the email.
     var autoreply = generateAutoreply(email);
   
     // Send the autoreply.
     GmailApp.sendEmail(email.getFrom(), 'Autoreply', autoreply);
   }
   ```

3. Replace the `OPENAI_API_KEY` placeholder with your OpenAI API key.
4. Click the **Save** button.
5. Click the **Run** button to test the script.

Once the script is working, you can set it up to run automatically whenever you receive a new email. To do this, click the **Triggers** tab and then click the **Add Trigger** button. Select the **On New Message** trigger and then click the **Save** button.

That's it! You have now created an autoreply for emails using Google Apps Script and OpenAI.

Here are some additional tips for using this autoreply system effectively:

- **Personalize the autoreply:** You can personalize the autoreply by including the recipient's name in the greeting and by using information from the email body in the body of the autoreply.
- **Tailor the autoreply to different types of emails:** You can create different autoreplies for different types of emails, such as customer inquiries, marketing emails, and meeting invitations.
- **Use the autoreply as a starting point:** The autoreply can be used as a starting point for a more personalized response. If you have time, you can review the autoreply and make any necessary edits before sending it.

## Example: 

Here is my repo with an example of a google script: 
https://github.com/josephedward/GPT_autoreply

Keep in mind: 
- You will need to grant your Apps Script the necessary permissions in appscript.json.
- You will be forced to utilize only Google Script libraries in your JavaScript code.
- You will have to enable your trigger/schedule for operation, which will probably require some dialing in for your use case.