Astro aims to fix your email mess with an AI chatbot

Do you want a chatbot to help you manage email overload?

That’s the question that Astro has to answer now that it’s officially launching on iOS and the Mac. It’s the simplest, quickest way to describe what Astro offers today. And when you put it that way, the answer is almost surely “no.” But Astro has bigger ambitions than just cramming a chat interface into your email. It has ambitions to become the default AI system that can talk to all of your work software. It’s starting with email, but your calendar, sales software, task management suite, and all the rest are meant to come next.

But to start, Astro simply presents itself as a straight forward email app that works well with both Office 365 and Gmail — precisely the thing that umpteen, if not dozens of startups have tried before. For Astro, getting a native mail client across Macs and iPhones is just table stakes. But it has to get those stakes right where so many others have not. So let’s start there.

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Astro is a native email app on Apple’s two main computing platforms, and it does what most modern email apps ought to do: separates your email into two groups (Priority and Other) and allows you to snooze emails until later. It has a unified inbox, reminders, and a swiping interface for triaging email. Astro will also allow attachments from multiple cloud storage services and let you set notifications just for the priority inbox.

Those features alone put it in the right league — too many apps only work on the phone but eschew the desktop, leaving Gmail and Office 365 users with a confusing mess of folders.

But what the startup (which has employees who have worked at companies like Zimbra, Asana, LinkedIn, and Google) hopes to do is nail the fundamentals and then add in a chatbot that can use machine learning to fix the sort of things other emails apps try to handle with buttons and other user interface tricks.

Here’s the basic idea: instead of crafting your own filters and carefully denoting VIP contacts, Astro will watch how you use your email and its chatbot will try to anticipate your needs. Always snooze emails from the family until the evening? Astro will offer to do it automatically. You can tell it to clear out old emails, or remind you to email your boss tomorrow. It can even scan your contact list and map our who knows who (with some privacy protections) so that when you want to get in touch with somebody, it can see who among your contacts is the best person to make an introduction.

That’s the idea, anyway. The implementation isn’t quite as elegant as the theory. Astro’s bot appears in a separate space from your standard email tasks — gently offering suggestions when it has them, eminently ignorable if you’re not interested.

It does attempt to call out specific emails that need your attention. If somebody important (like, say, your boss) is asking for something specific (like, say, that spreadsheet you promised) the chatbot will call it out to you. It will take note of emails you reflexively delete and ask if you just want to unsubscribe from the darn things.

It’s gotten tiresome to hear about AI and Machine Learning from companies both large and small. Even the big corporations like Google and Microsoft don’t always get it right, so it’s fair to take a skeptical stance when asking if a startup like Astro can pull it off.

But the idea is sound: most modern workplaces have important stuff scattered across multiple software systems: email, calendar, Asana, Trello, FogBugz, SalesForce, Slack, you name it. Increasingly, everybody has to manage a whole bunch of this stuff and find a way to move conversations and ideas from one platform to the next.

So what Astro is promising isn’t just a chatbot for email, but an assistant that can eventually handle the cognitive load or making sense of all of those different systems. It’s the sort of thing Google is also talking about this week at its Google Cloud Next conference, actually. Whoever figures it out first is going to be a big winner, but nobody’s really close at all yet.

That’s why Astro is starting small — with the easily mockable idea of a chatbot glommed on to an email client. Mock away, but it’s a start. And Astro is slightly different from Google, Microsoft, and Apple in this game: it’s willing to work across multiple software platforms and be the glue between them rather than try to win it all like G Suite, Office, and iCloud. That strategy worked pretty well for Slack.

Correction: a previous version of this article referred to Exchange instead of Office 365.