Startup has a cure for the inbox blues
Caspy reads all your email and prompts you to pay attention to important ones
KITCHENER — David Shak found the perfect use for emails from corporate criminals at Enron, and the digital missives from Hillary Clinton’s private servers — all of which had been made public through lawsuits and leaks.
He ran the messages through his new email platform called Caspy, which helps individuals and sole-owner businesses manage their email accounts.
Since the Chrome extension was launched on Product Hunt earlier this month, more than 3,000 users have downloaded it. It received a boost when Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit, praised Caspy on Twitter.
Before Caspy could be launched, the artificial intelligence deployed in the email-management platform needed to nurture its digital brain. So Shak moved large caches of emails through Caspy. It learned a lot about business, thanks to the Enron emails, and about politics, thanks to the Clinton emails from her time as secretary of state in the Obama administration. “It learned from that stuff,” said Shak. Once the machine learning kicked in, Shak and two other developers working at the startup massaged artificial intelligence features of the platform to automatically manage emails.
Caspy reads everything and prompts you to pay attention to important emails. If contacts go unused for three months, it will ask to delete them. Or it will ask you to send a quick message just to keep that contact active. It ranks your contacts in order of importance based on the language used in the message, the subject and how quickly you responded to previous emails from that sender.
“One of the interesting things Caspy does early on is scan your inbox for the last three months and get an idea of who is important to you,” said Shak.
“Caspy thinks my wife is No. 3, third most important to me, and that may be true according to email,” he added.
The email management platform will interrupt you with alerts to your smartphone about important developments that need your immediate attention.
Using artificial intelligence, the software analyzes the language used in emails to determine the importance. Shak and his two employees built the platform using artificial intelligence developed at Google — TensorFlow and SyntaxNet, which includes the natural language understanding tool called Parsey McParseface.
Currently, the platform can be used with Gmail, which has more users than any other email system, said Shak. Caspy appears as an icon on the Chrome desktop. Shak and his small team are developing other versions that will work with Outlook and Salesforce.
“Caspy as a product now is free on the Chrome store, and it is available to everyone, and eventually we will charge for it,” he said.
Shak’s tech experience includes big data, financial services, email, document sharing and customer relations management. In one of his previous jobs, Shak had a personal assistant. The experience was so positive, it was part of the inspiration for Caspy.
“For a long time I thought about doing something like this,” he said.
About 150 emails a day arrive in the average email account, said Shak. If you are in front of computer all day, that’s no big deal, he said. But if you are trying to run a small business or are in the field most of the day, selling real estate or visiting job sites, for example, dealing with those emails can be a hassle.
“The other thing about Caspy, it sends an email every morning with your top three things you should do today,” said Shak.
Last fall, during the U.S. presidential election, Shak put all the tweets from Donald Trump and Clinton through the Caspy platform. It invited users to enter their Twitter handles, and Caspy would identify your tweet that was most Trump-like or Clinton-like.
“We had an incredible response to that,” said Shak. “We had 350 hits per second for a long time.”