Alison is a revolutionary artificial intelligence personality that proactively handles your email.
Imagine having a personal assistant that takes care of the majority of your emails for you. Alison does not wait for you to ask her a question, she reaches out to you on her own. If she thinks an email could be spam, she will ask you if you know the person that sent it. Want to schedule an email to be sent 3 days from now at 12pm? Just ask her to do it. Only want to hear from certain people for the next week? Tell her and she’ll handle it.
You can think of Alison as an advanced version of Apple’s Siri, or Amazon’s Alexa. But instead of giving you sass, turning on music, or ordering a pizza, she is optimized to alleviate your pain from email overload.
Alison has a deep understanding of the world that no other system on the market has. She knows for example a dog is a living animal that can hurt other living things, a file is used to store data, or that a bedroom is used for sleeping. This is critical, so when she analyzes your email, she can understand ambiguous sentences and the context of what is being talked about. Alison will be the first A.I. on the market to understand context and be able to have an actual conversation with you.
Alison lives in the cloud so she continually learns how to best serve you. The more you use her the more helpful she becomes as she learns your habits and how you use email.
Skeptical? Don’t be. Check out our demo videos below:
It’s simple. All you need to do is connect your email inbox to the app so she can start to process your email flow. She’ll learn how you use email and start helping you right away. If you only want her help for specific tasks, just let her know. She can dynamically change how she interacts with you based on your preferences.
Each time Alison processes one of your emails she uses one email credit. Alison will continue processing emails until all of your available credits are exhausted.
For example, the intro package comes with 30 email credits to be used over one month. Alison will process and perform notifications and tasks for the last 30 emails in your inbox. Once 30 emails are processed for the month, you will have to wait until the next month for the email credits to reload. Higher tier subscriptions will allow for more email processing per month.
The average person spends 30 hours of the week reading and responding to email.
The McKinsey Global Institute found that an average person spends 30 hours a week reading and responding to email. That’s by far the most time-consuming activity at 28% of our time. Alison will filter, respond and handle the bulk of your email for you. Imagine the time you would save over the course of a year (650 hours) once you are freed from reactive, low-value work.
And…Less than half of emails deserve attention.
According to SaneBox’s internal data, the average inbox contains only 38% important, relevant emails. This means 62% of the emails in the average inbox are not important and are a complete waste of your time to check.
Think of all the time you lose each day, week and month, reading low quality email? We’re talking hundreds of hours over the course of a year. Those hours are much better spent on productive work, or better yet quality rest and relaxation with friends and family.
There’s more content coming into our inboxes than we could ever hope to consume in a lifetime. We all have the problem of trying to filter through the noise to focus on the most important and relevant messages. As the amount of information continues to expand this problem will only worsen.
Alison is your information gatekeeper. She weeds out the irrelevant noise. And makes sure your mental bandwidth is only taken up by messages that matter.
The current version of Alison only works with gmail and requires you to have an internet browser open. With your help we can start to roll out the next set of features so Alison can be used on all platforms and mobile devices.
Here’s a brief road map of what we plan to develop next:
Upgrades For Alison
We want to beef up Alison’s capabilities so she can handle almost any situation. This involves feeding her a massive amount of email data sets so she is familiar with almost every type of email conversation.
We will analyze things like the Enron email corpus and other publicly available data sets to ensure that all types of situations can be handled.
Develop The Windows Application
The Microsoft Windows application will run on any Windows operating system and allow Alison to automatically ask you questions or notify you of emails quickly. You won’t have to have a browser open.
Develop The Android and iOs Applications
We will be developing applications for Android and iOs so that Alison can talk to you proactively on your phone, anytime and anywhere.
Processing Costs and New Servers
It costs around $10-$15 to analyze and process one gigabyte of email data. Part of your contributions will go directly towards the hardware, storage and computation costs necessary to support Alison’s workflow.
Right now we outsource most of that processing to 3rd party cloud companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Our hope is that your donations will also allow us to buy our own servers to process your data so we don’t have to pay 3rd party prices. If our processing costs go down, Alison gets cheaper for everyone.
Team Funding & Support Staff
To quickly finish and deliver the features and and applications detailed above, we need to bring on new developers and system administrators. Having a team that can support us with testing, quality assurance, and hardware support will increase your experience with Alison dramatically.
Right now we are a team of 2. With your help we can expand the team to 4-5 people and deliver a high quality product much quicker.
Dan Clark, our lead developer, started working on the artificial intelligence system that powers Alison in 2006. Being a lifelong Star Trek nerd, his dream since he was a teenager was to create an intelligent, semi-conscious or fully-conscious software personality that was aware of itself and the people it was interacting with. This was a massive undertaking that involved understanding language/grammar/semantics, how the brain functions, conversational flow, concepts, logic, hypotheticals, awareness and much more. Slowly over time, each piece of the system was built and integrated together.
Dan has been writing software for 20 years, worked for multiple Fortune 100 companies and designed, created, and successfully deployed over a dozen enterprise applications. He has almost 2 decades of full stack development, working on everything from back end databases and server development to front end user interface development.
Alison is his passion project and we want to finally bring it into the light!
The underlying technology for Alison has been under development for over 10 years. Our team has read over 100 books on everything from linguistics to behaviorism. We have wrote over 150,000 lines of code to build Alison, and are confident that any hurdles will be overcome.
But there is no doubt that there will be challenges along the way. This project has a lot of complexity.
Some challenges we foresee are things like:
To resolve some of the challenges mentioned above, we have a number of solutions in place to handle them.
For example, emails with large attachments will have only a certain portion of the text ingested so that the back end servers are not overtaxed. All data being ingested will be measured down to the byte so that the system’s baseline performance is maintained. The system also has a number of fail safes to stop processing if the data it is analyzing is meaningless (or garbage).
Does Alison work with all email clients?
Right now she only integrates with gmail accounts. With your help we can expand her capabilities to include all email clients.
Are there settings? Can I adjust how often she talks to me? Say I get 100 emails a day. Will she start talking to me every single time I get a new email?
Yes, there are settings. You will be able to adjust how much she talks to you, the types of emails you care about, etc by just talking to her.
Can you set a time of the day for her to talk to you and batch your email decisions?
Absolutely. Just tell her: “Only tell me about emails between 8pm and 10pm.”
Can she delete emails? Send emails?
Yes and Yes.
How does she read the email? Does she only look at the gmail “primary” box or does she look at every single email that comes in?
Currently, she will only look at your ‘Primary’ email folder. In the future, she will be able to look at any folder.
How does she learn about you?
You can tell her things about yourself and soon she will start asking you about how your day is going, your friends and family, etc to learn more about you.
What types of suggestions will she make?
She will ask you about people or companies to determine if you know them so she can filter messages for you. She will try to handle appointments for you, automatically respond to emails for you (if you tell her to do so), and act as an assistant that handles your email so you don’t have to check it or think about it at all.
What if you ignore her and don’t answer 100 emails? Will she keep pestering you about unanswered emails?
She will not continually ask you about unanswered questions or emails, unless you tell her to.
How does Allison deal with attachments? Can she analyze those?
Yes. She can process and understand text within certain types of attachments, such as Microsoft Word, PDF, Text files, HTML, and PowerPoint.
Securing your data is highly important to us. We encrypt the connection from your browser to our servers using HTTPs. Connections to your email provider also use HTTPs. No one can view your data in either direction as it moves. We also encrypt the entire filesystem that your data resides on. Your data would be meaningless to anyone who could potentially gain access to it.
Your data within the database is secured using multiple layers of access protection. Only login credentials can permit access.
We do not and never will sell your data to any 3rd party.
Your data can be removed from our systems at anytime by request.