Transcript: ‘How We Built Our AI Email Assistant: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Cora’

The transcript of AI & I with Kieran Klaassen, Brandon Gell, and Nityesh Agarwal is below. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Timestamps

Introduction: 00:01:40
Three ways Cora transforms your inbox (and your day): 00:04:21
A live walkthrough of Cora’s features: 00:05:09
The inside story of the first time Kieran, Brandon, and Dan used Cora: 00:12:13
Train Cora like you would a trusted chief of staff: 00:16:30
The AI tools that blew our minds while building Cora: 00:27:25
How we build workflows that compound with AI at Every: 00:30:34
The dream features that we’d like to put on Cora’s roadmap: 00:42:36

Transcript

(00:00:00)

Dan Shipper

Welcome to the show everybody.

Brandon Gell

Thanks, Dan.

Kieran Klaassen

Thank you. Good to be here.

Nityesh Agarwal

Thanks for having us.

Dan Shipper

So today is a really big day. We are officially GA-ing Cora. Cora is the AI assistant. Cora is the AI email assistant that we've been building for the last year. It’s been in beta for the last six months. It had 10,000 people on the waitlist. Now it has over 1,000 daily active users, which is incredible. It’s one of the most sticky products that I've ever seen, and it's something that everybody on the team uses every single day. It’s a total delight to use and it's so fun to finally have it out where anyone can use it. And so I wanted to bring the whole team on the show to talk about what the product is, how we got here, what it's been like to build it, what we've learned and where we're going. So let's go around and everyone introduces themselves. Brandon, do you want to start?

Brandon Gell

Yes, I'm Brandon. I run the studio here at Every and I help run the consultancy. Kieran?

Kieran Klaassen

I’m Kieran. I am the GA. I'm building Cora. I'm writing the code. I started writing all the code by myself doing support, features, everything, and then got Nityesh on board to join the team to ship features because we felt there was something we needed to go quicker. Even with AI, you still need to have people, so that's when Nityesh joined.

Nityesh Agarwal

Yeah. And I'm Nityesh and I'm the engineer on Cora helping Kieran. I'm the newest member of the team. I'm having fun helping Kieran code very cool stuff in Cora.

Kieran Klaassen

Basically we're just jamming on like, how can we use AI the best way to build Cora, which is really, really cool.

Dan Shipper

Yeah. Basically for anyone who's been following along with the podcast, they actually don't build anything. They just tell Claude to build stuff now. So if you're interested in how Cora's gotten built—all the details—definitely go check out an episode we published three three weeks ago on Cloud Code. But yeah, I want to start with showing people the product because I think that's the best way to understand it and get excited about it. So Kieran, maybe share your screen and while you're doing that I'll tee it up a little bit.

I think a good way to think about what Cora is, is it sort of like having a chief of staff in your inbox for $15 a month instead of $150,000 a year. And the thing that it does for me is I just have that kind of feeling where I'm just like someone is taking care of my emails so that I don't have to think about it and I can focus on stuff that actually matters to me. And Cora does three things. One is it screens your emails so it decides what needs to be in your inbox and what you don't actually need to see—so anything urgent, anything you need to reply to from a human gets to your inbox. The second thing it does is it pre-drafts replies. So when an email comes in that you need to respond to, it will take a look at your writing style and previous emails you responded to, and try to draft a reply for you. So it saves time that way. And then twice a day, it sends you a brief summary of all of the stuff that comes into your inbox that you need to read, but you don't need to respond to. So you sort of just scroll through your email and in 30 seconds you've read through your email and it's done. And that's what Kieran's looking at right now. So Kieran, do you want to just go up to the top and talk about what we're looking at?

Kieran Klaassen

Yeah. So there are two things here. This is the product, Cora, but obviously you have your inbox as well. This is my inbox. Normally before Cora, I was not an inbox zero person. I had just thousands of emails here in my inbox and mainly, so I was on vacation last week, that's why I didn't read all my briefs. But mainly what I see here are briefs and everything else that's in here. I should do something with it. So and this is funny, I was invited to core as well. So really the idea is to get to the most important things in my inbox and open the brief and look at my brief.

Dan Shipper

Can you show us what that brief email looks like?

Kieran Klaassen

What I do is I can open my brief within Gmail and it will give me a number, 84 percent of my emails today are handled. And it will give an overview of the stuff that's in the brief so I can kind of see like, Hey, I can scan over it and everything important will also be highlighted. You don't need to go into Cora, but you can. And if you click into Cora, you go here and you can dive deeper.

Dan Shipper

And so for people who are listening, he clicked into Cora and what you see is this really beautiful oil painting of a sky background. It’s a very kind of different aesthetic for email software. And then there's a bunch of different sections of this brief, and each section takes a bunch of emails that we think fit that section and then categorize it together and summarize it. So if you go back up to the top Kieran, talk about each section.

Kieran Klaassen

Let me see if there's anything here. So yeah, I jumped to Wednesday afternoon briefly. You can see the background change as well in the afternoon. And the most important stuff is on the top, it's called important info. It means you should know about it, but it doesn't mean you have to take action. Anything that needs your immediate attention or action will stay in your inbox that is time sensitive. But everything that's important to know like for example Chase said something to me. So everything important is here. This is the one you always want to look at and everything else is kind of will get the most important stuff for you summarized, so you can actually read everything else like newsletters. If you receive 30 newsletters per day, this is an easier way to scan your newsletters. For payments, you just see a summary of what happened, where did the money flow? Who did you pay? Did you receive money? And you can see here also this is in English, this is in Dutch. So if things are in a specific language, if you are not all receiving English, it will summarize it in your, in your language. And it's really fun because what we try to do here is we try to give you the highlights of what the newsletter says and like the most important points, and give you enough information to say, hey, I want to learn more. I want to see more. So let's see. I want to learn more here. I can click into and open this email or newsletter and read it here. Or I can jump to Gmail and read it from there.

Dan Shipper

One of the really cool things about this, at least for me, is obviously we publish a daily newsletter, and you can even see every here The Man Inside the Minds of the People Building AGI is one of the newsletters here, and that's Every and it's an overview of a previous episode in this podcast, which is kind of fun. And what's really cool for me is. I spent a lot of time with Kieran just like refining the prompts to be like, how would I as a writer summarize these emails? And it's a really interesting, different kind of writing task where you're not writing a specific piece, you're writing like many pieces. It’s meta writing. And that's one of the things I think we can bring to emails is we have a writer sensibility inside of Every, and that comes into how we summarize your emails for you, so you're getting the best summary possible of what's in your inbox.

Brandon Gell

I think the other thing that I really like about what we did with Cora was it's kind of like this extremely opinionated way of using email, starting from a place all of us hate email. We don't want to be doing email. It wasn't like we were like, let's make an assistant it wasn't it didn't start there. It was just like the very first principle. How do I want to interact with this thing that is an open door to anybody in the world? And like I remember our first pitch was it's a to-do list written by everybody but yourself.

Dan Shipper

Traditionally email is a to-do list written by everyone but yourself.

Brandon Gell

Yes. And so I feel like just over the past year, we all started, we had like the initial hunch of an opinion of how we wanted to manage our inbox, which was that we didn't want to be distracted. And that has sort of grown into this fully fledged product that is 100 percent opinionated, which is why when we have people use it, 80 percent of people that use it, they absolutely love it and it literally changes their relationship to email, which is how I would describe my experience with it. And then there's another 20 percent that absolutely hate it. We're totally okay with that because it's so opinionated and you're just not a good fit. But that's made an amazing, sticky product for that.

(00:10:00)

Dan Shipper

Yeah. I think the thing that it reveals is how much we have this anxious attachment to our email inboxes. And so it's actually very uncomfortable to use it for the first time. But over time what I've learned is. I don't actually need to be looking at my inbox all the time. That was just a lie. And my life is way better when I'm not, because I know Cora is handling it for me. And I know Kieran, you have this story of like the first time that we realized this, the first time we tried having Cora handle our emails. Do you want to, do you want to tell that story?

Kieran Klaassen