CatchUp

Demo Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-NDlahbAfE

Github Repo: https://github.com/Nsilswal/CatchUp

CatchUp Won the Enterprise Track Award at the Duke OpenAI Hackathon in 2023

Inspiration

As a college student, I often found myself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of emails flooding my inbox. This led to severe mental stress, overlooking important information, and unproductivity. My friends shared these sentiments, but we realized we were not nearly alone. According to a McKinsey report from 2012, over 30B emails are sent and received every week globally, and working professionals spend over 25% of their time managing emails, derailing them from critical tasks.

What it does

CatchUp liberates individuals from digital communication overload by enabling users to focus on the meat of their work rather than messaging logistics. CatchUp is your personal weekly newsletter. The service will send you weekly recap emails from your inbox, highlighting achievements and remaining action items with quick access to get them done. Rather than shuffling through hundreds of emails, CatchUp uses generative AI to categorize your emails into bite-sized ingestible chunks, telling you all you need to know without the sense of being overwhelmed.

How we built it

CatchUp was built using Python and OpenAI API. Specifically, we used the imaplib library to get and parse user emails and the smtplib library to compose/send the customized email summary for a user. To generate the custom summary itself, we called the Open AI API endpoint with custom prompts to parse through email bodies and determine what the most important points were for the user.

Challenges we ran into

Building CatchUp came with many fun (and not fun) problems to solve. An initial problem we encountered was the inability to parse emails located on our personal Duke emails because of 2-factor authentication. To avoid this issue we exported our entire inbox and imported it into a test email account where MFA wasn’t enabled. Another issue we found was dealing with the token limit for each call of OpenAI API. The text contained within all of the emails easily surpasses the token limit for the API, hence we decided to break up queries into several smaller chunks for summarization.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

On the technical side, we are immensely proud of what we accomplished while building CatchUp. Our initial MVP didn’t actually include custom email summaries. Instead it focused on simply outputting a text file with the custom summaries. While this felt good enough for the MVP, we felt we could do better. We feel that enabling users to actually receive an email with their custom summary is essential, as it drives home how easy it is for organizations to deliver a CatchUp to its members. Furthermore, by emailing users we prove that CatchUp can easily be integrated into the existing workflows of Schools, Businesses, and individuals. Another technical challenge we are proud of is CatchUp’s ability to handle large amounts of data. Efficiently breaking up email data into chunks was no easy task, and was necessary to deliver summaries that span the entirety of a user’s email history.

We believe that CatchUp has significant business potential. With a $57B market cap for enterprise products, CatchUp has great potential to gain revenue and reach. With a subscription service that starts with a free trial, users will get hooked on having this email assistant and will be willing to pay regularly to keep it up. If we partner with businesses, they can have the option to pay more to reprioritize the order of what’s sent in their employees’ recap emails. A partnership with Classwise could be mutually beneficial. Classwise could integrate with CatchUp to provide insights into students’ email usage and communication patterns. This data could be valuable for educators and administrators to understand how students are engaging with their emails, allowing them to tailor communication strategies. Additionally, CatchUp could monetize off advertisements that cater to content pulled from user’s emails; for example, Chegg may be a perfect sponsor for student users. While competitors exist to enhance email productivity, CatchUp uniquely saves users’ time by summarizing emails and boosts productivity by directly decreasing their workload.

What we learned

Throughout the course of this project, we gained many new skills and solidified old ones. Going into the project, neither of us had experience using the Open AI API and found that it was very well documented with plenty of support for various features. Furthermore, parsing through emails was initially very difficult as completing authentication within the scope of our project proved much harder than anticipated. Ideating and coming up with ways around this issue proved very beneficial, and helped us better understand how to deliver an MVP while focusing on core product features.

What’s next for CatchUp

While we are proud of what CatchUp is currently, we have several ideas to grow it technologically and from a business perspective. Firstly, we think CatchUp can directly be used to boost user morale and their mental state. Given access to users’ sent folders, we can highlight achievements from the week rather than just focusing on what needs to be done. Additionally, by analyzing their tone and understanding the user’s upcoming plans, we can personalize the intros and outros of CatchUp’s recap email. Secondly, we would like to embed hyperlinks into the recap emails to allow users to directly access content and provide us with more data on where users are the most active to iterate how we prioritize the results we show them. Thirdly, we’d like to incorporate a feature that can highlight information from unopened emails, as that implies users have likely missed those. Lastly, we would like to expand the platforms CatchUp can run on. Currently, we have tested it on Outlook, but we believe it would be straightforward to apply this service to other messaging platforms, like Slack. We’d also like to avail Microsoft Azure’s capabilities to scale CatchUp and store the email recaps in the cloud. Additionally, Azure could help provide robust security and implement encryption to avoid privacy issues. Lastly, Azure allows for easy integration with various Microsoft products, such as Office 365 and Outlook. CatchUp can explore integrations that make it seamless for users to connect their email accounts and enhance the service’s compatibility with Microsoft’s email platforms. A partnership with Classwise could also be phenomenal. Classwise could integrate with CatchUp to provide insights into students’ email usage and communication patterns. This data could be valuable for educators and administrators to understand how students are engaging with their emails, allowing them to tailor communication strategies.