IT'S one of the luxuries of the corporate elite: a personal assistant who takes your overflowing inbox and turns it into a simple to-do list. Many people would love such help, if only they could afford it. But what if the cost was less than $2 a day? That's the idea behind software that uses crowdsourced workers to manage email overload.
GmailValet, developed by Nicolas Kokkalis and colleagues at Stanford University in California, works by connecting a Gmail account with oDesk, a crowd-labour web platform that draws upon a relatively skilled workforce. Users can deal with privacy fears by deploying filters that limit the access given to oDesk workers. All emails from family members can be excluded from the system, for example.
Once the workers are in, they examine new emails and, if appropriate, extract a task from the message, which appears in a to-do list that sits alongside the inbox on the GmailValet website, such as reminding the user to respond to a meeting request, for example. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on the tasks, so that the assistants can better understand their needs.
In initial tests, the assistants were paid the California minimum wage of $8 per hour. The researchers suggest that a single assistant could monitor dozens of inboxes simultaneously, though. If that proves to be the case, the service could end up costing each user as little as $1.80 per day.
The tests also revealed that users benefited from the to-do lists: the task-completion rate for those who worked with assistants was nearly 60 per cent, compared with less than 30 per cent for control participants, who had to create their own task lists. One user described the appearance of the tasks as "like magic".
"This is an important step forward in enabling the crowd to work on private and sensitive information," says Aniket Kittur, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "It opens the door for the crowd helping us with our personal lives in ways we wouldn't have imagined even a few years ago."
The work will be presented next month at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing conference in San Antonio, Texas. The system is available to try out for free at gmailvalet.com.
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Personal assistant for your emails streamlines your life
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Personal assistant for your emails streamlines your life
