When Flowrite is asked if it isGrammarly on steroids, CEO and co-founder Aaro Isosaari laughs, saying that they always get the comment for the artificial intelligence writing productivity tool they have been building since late summer 2020.
The quest for Inbox zero could be simpler with this sidekick. If you are the sort of person who emails a lot each and every day, you should be happy.
What does Flowrite do? It turns a few instructions into email that is nice to read. Flowrite helps you write the thing in the first place if the thing is email or some other professional messaging type communications.
Email is what Flowrite's models have been trained on. The startup was inspired by his frustration with the amount of time he was spending on emails. It's focus is firmly professional comms, rather than broader use cases for AI-generated words, such as copy writing etc.
The valuation of the company makes it possible to make you an even better writer.
In his previous work, he spent hours every day communicating with different stakeholders on email and other messaging platforms. There are millions of people who could benefit from communicating more effectively and efficiently in their day to day work, and we knew we had a problem with that.
Flowrite works like this: The user gives a set of instructions that cover the key points of what they want to say, and the tool uses artificial intelligence to create a full email text that conveys the required info in a way that flows.
The wordy leg work of filling in courteous greetings/sign-offs is being done by automation.
Email templates are an existing tech for email productivity, but the advantage is that the tool is adaptive and isn't static.
One important point is that the user gets the chance to check over the suggested text before hitting send, so the human remains firmly in the loop.
In order to get a Flowrite-generated email that includes the essential details, you have to type something like "sounds amazing" in the email instructions.
Flowrite did not use its tool in its initial pitch to TechCrunch. The email did not include a disclosure that said: "This email is Flowritten." Which, perhaps, gives an indication of the types of email communications you might want to speed- write and those you might want to dedicate more of your human brain to.
The writing tools built by us help professionals of all kinds to write and communicate faster as part of their daily work routine. Millions of people spend hours every day on emails and messages in a professional context, so communicating with different stakeholders takes a lot of work, daily working hours. Flowrite helps people do that quickly.
He suggests that the tool could be useful for people who find writing difficult because they don't speak English as their native language.
Flowrite can only turn out emails in English. While GPT-3 has models for some other common languages, he suggests the quality of its responses might not be as good as they are in English.
They are using GPT-3's language model as the core tech, but have also begun to use their own accumulated data to "fine tune" it.
The email productivity tool will adapt to the user's writing style so that faster emails won't also mean curtly out of character emails, which could lead to fresh emails asking if you're okay.
The tech is not mining your entire email history to do this, but only looks at the preceding context in an email thread.
He says that they want to move to on-device processing, which would help address any confidentiality concerns, since they are calling GPT-3's tech.
The tool integrates with web email. Currently it only works for Chrome and Gmail, but the team plans to expand integrations, such as for messaging platforms like Slack.
The tech tool is still in a closed alpha and has just announced a seed raise.
The seed is led by Project A, along with Moonfire Venture and angel investors, including the CEO of Supercell, Ilkka Paananen. Existing investors also joined in the round.
Flowrite is best suited for emails and professionals. On the content side, it is usually replies where there is some kind of existing context that you are responding to.
He suggests that it is able to understand the situation and adapt to it in a natural way. If you want to write something that is really, really complex, you need to have all the information in the instructions. If you need to spend a lot of time writing the instruction that could be close to the final email, Flowrite isn't worth much.
It is not going to offer great utility if you are just answering with a couple of words, since it is likely quicker to type that yourself.
According to the company, they have had a wide range of early users wanting to use the Flowrite. He describes the main user as executives, managers, entrepreneurs who communicate a lot on a daily basis and need to give a good impression about themselves.
Flowrite has a focus on prosumers/individual users, although it may look to expand out from there. He says he could see a kind of software as a service for businesses down the line.
It will add pricing early next year, but currently it is not charging for the trial.
He suggests that a full launch of the game could happen by mid 2022, so no more waiting.
The main goal of the seed funding is to grow the team, with the main goal being to tool up around the core product.
Adding a horizontal way of using the tool across the browser is one of the priorities.
The GPT-3 hype seems reasonable.
