Email Innovator Superhuman Says Its AI Search Is Twice as Fast as Gmail's

Superhuman says it can beat Gmail in a race--of AI tools. The email app recently rolled out a suite of email optimization tools, including a new collection of AI-powered features developed with OpenAI's GPT models. The new features are "2-3x faster than the AI search in Gmail and Outlook," Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra wrote in a recent blog post. Superhuman's service starts at $30 per month per user, or $25 per month for an annual subscription. Additional pricing options exist for enterprise customers with more than 15 users. Founded in 2014 to help people achieve inbox zero in minutes rather than hours, Superhuman was one of the earliest companies to directly collaborate on AI-powered features with OpenAI. These include instantly generating draft replies to messages, tightening up emails, and auto-summarizing threads. Superhuman's newest GPT-powered feature, Ask AI, is essentially a chatbot-based search engine for your inbox. Say your company is planning an offsite retreat and you need to find booking info for each member of your team. You could spend a lengthy portion of time searching through keywords and usernames to compile a document, or you could just ask Superhuman AI to scan through your inbox and pull out all the relevant information. And for those worried about the AI generating false information, also known as a hallucination, the chatbot includes clickable citations, which link directly to the email from which that specific information is being pulled. Still, Vohra acknowledges that the system doesn't get it right 100 percent of the time yet. At its I/O developer conference last week, Google announced new Gmail capabilities powered by its proprietary large language model Gemini, including a similar feature in which users can talk to a chatbot to search through their email. Vohra says he isn't worried about the Goliath-size competition, insisting that Superhuman is "more contextualized and personalized" than Google's "corporate-sounding" AI. To demonstrate Superhuman's speed advantage over Gmail, Vohra sent Inc. a video in which a Superhuman employee posed a few questions to Superhuman's and Gmail's AI assistants, both pulling from the same inbox. The employee asked both email clients "when is the product team offsite," and then asked follow-up questions like "which hotel should I stay at?" At first, the responses were generally similar in content, although Superhuman's were consistently faster. As more follow-up questions were added, though, the Gmail assistant began hallucinating, while Superhuman continued accurately pulling from the inbox. Google did not respond to a request for comment regarding the speed or accuracy of Gmail's AI assistant. Vohra says that Superhuman's internal metrics show that users are saving an average of four hours a week that had previously been devoted to inbox management. "Stop searching, and start finding," he says. "You'll be much better off simply asking the AI what it is you want."