How We Built Our AI Email Assistant: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Cora
🤖 AI Summary
Overview
This episode dives into the creation and evolution of Cora, an AI-powered email assistant designed to transform how users manage their inboxes. The team behind Cora shares insights into its development, the challenges they faced, and the vision for its future. Cora aims to simplify email management by categorizing, summarizing, and even drafting replies, offering users a chief of staff
experience for a fraction of the cost.
Notable Quotes
- Email is a to-do list written by everyone but yourself.
– Brandon, on the philosophy behind Cora's design.
- Cora just forces me to focus on what matters. It’s not just a product change—it’s a lifestyle change.
– Brandon, reflecting on the emotional impact of using Cora.
- Your email is the story of your life, and Cora uses AI to pick out the pieces that matter most.
– Kieran, on the personalization capabilities of Cora.
📧 The Problem with Email and Cora’s Vision
- Email is described as overwhelming and anxiety-inducing, with most messages being irrelevant or non-actionable.
- Cora was built to act as a chief of staff
for your inbox, screening emails, summarizing non-urgent ones, and drafting replies in your voice.
- The product is highly opinionated, aiming to change how users interact with email entirely. While 80% of users love it, the remaining 20% find it too rigid—a tradeoff the team embraces.
🛠️ Building Cora: From Prototype to Product
- The first version of Cora was built in just four hours during an offsite in Nice, France, where the team immediately felt the impact of a cleaner inbox.
- Over time, the product evolved into a sophisticated system combining rule-based algorithms and large language models (LLMs) to categorize and summarize emails.
- Challenges included managing LLM costs, scaling for thousands of users, and ensuring the system could adapt to individual preferences.
🤖 The Role of AI in Personalization
- Cora’s Assistant feature allows users to customize their email experience deeply, from categorizing daycare updates to prioritizing investor emails.
- The assistant learns from user feedback and interactions, creating a dynamic and personalized experience.
- The team emphasizes the importance of balancing generalization with individualization, ensuring the product feels tailored without being overly complex.
🛠️ Tools and Techniques Behind the Scenes
- The team uses innovative tools like Monologue (voice-to-text dictation) and Claude Code to streamline development and improve collaboration.
- They record and analyze their workflows to create reusable prompts and commands, embodying a philosophy of compounding engineering
to make processes more efficient over time.
- This approach extends beyond engineering, influencing writing and editorial workflows within the company.
🚀 The Future of Cora
- Upcoming features include an iOS app, a unified brief across multiple inboxes, and deeper integration with user workflows.
- The team envisions Cora becoming a standalone email platform, replacing Gmail entirely for some users.
- Long-term, they aim to make Cora smarter and more intuitive, capable of understanding users as deeply as a long-term personal assistant.
AI-generated content may not be accurate or complete and should not be relied upon as a sole source of truth.
📋 Episode Description
You don’t need to handle your inbox anymore. It’s Cora’s job now.
Cora is the AI chief of staff we built for your email at Every. It’s been in private beta for the last 6 months and currently manages email for 2,500 beta users—and today we’re making it available for anyone to use. Start your free 7-day trial by going to: https://cora.computer/
Cora is the $150K executive assistant that costs $15/month. Or $20/month if you want an Every subscription, too. This is what that actually means:
Cora understands what’s important to you, screens your inbox, and only lets the most relevant emails through.
The rest of your emails are summarized in a beautifully designed brief that’s sent to you twice a day.
If it has enough context, Cora drafts replies for you in your voice.
You can talk to Cora like you would your chief of staff—you can give it special instructions on how you want certain emails handled, ask it to summarize things, and even give you an opinion on complex decisions.
In this episode of AI & I, I sat down with the team behind Cora—Brandon Gell, head of the product studio; Kieran Klaassen, Cora’s general manager; and Nityesh Agarwal, engineer at Cora—for a closer look at how it all came together. We talk about:
The story of the first time Brandon, Kieran, and I used Cora, while sipping wine at the Every retreat in Nice.
The evolution of Cora’s categorization system, from a 4-hour vibe-coded prototype to a multi-faceted product with thousands of happy users.
The features on Cora’s roadmap we’re most excited about: a unified brief across different email accounts, an iOS app, and an even more powerful assistant.
This is a must-watch if you’re curious about what it feels like to give Cora your inbox, and take back your life. Go to https://cora.computer/ to start your 7-day free trial now.
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