Feature request: chat by email

ChatGPT Feature requests
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Proposal: Add Email-Based Interaction with OpenAI Models

I’m proposing that OpenAI consider enabling email-based interactions with its models. Users could send an email to initiate a conversation, and the model would respond via email once a reply is formulated.

Benefits:

  • Email integration offers:
    • Searchability directly within your email client.
    • Offline access to model responses.
    • Tagging, sorting, and organizing into folders, subfolders, or smart folders.
    • Access across all devices without needing to log into the web UI or launch the app.
    • Elimination of wait time while responses are generated—no need to watch as they load.
    • The ability to draft and revise questions within a native email client.
    • Use of all the threading and formatting advantages of modern email clients, such as rich text, spell check, and multi-line/multi-paragraph composition, without requiring OpenAI to duplicate these features in its web UI or app.

Architectural Perspective:

  • Requests could be processed at a lower execution priority (“re-niced”), as users wouldn’t expect real-time responses.
  • Read receipts could confirm that the message has been received and that the model is formulating a response.

This suggestion is not intended to replace OpenAI’s excellent web interface, but rather to provide a complementary, alternative interaction method—one that’s more transactional than conversational.

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Gosh, I would use this! Being able to utilize standard search tools for e-mail would make it easier to find my communications than on OpenAI’s custom web GUI.

Unlike something like Matrix, the primary benefit to OpenAI is indeed non-instantaneous response latency.

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Further benefits include easily seeing exactly when a conversation was initiated (each message being intrinsically timestamped by email). And arguably a neater ‘threading’ of conversations; instead of the temptation to mix a bunch of thoughts into one conversation, it should be more natural for an email client to ‘thread’ each one of the user’s thoughts/conversations/queries.

These are all notable shortcomings in OpenAI’s current web UI, yet they are all naturally part of every email client.

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I notice this concept has already been built out by a third party:
URL is emailgpt dot io
However, having used this, it’s unreliable (it simply failed to reply).
If OpenAi implemented this natively, it would be far more likely to succeed.

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I notice OpenAi today added ‘projects’ as an embarrassingly simplistic way to begin to categorise conversations. Such a pity that they are marching their UI towards being an email client without actually recognising that an email client already does all this stuff, and better, and more.

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@david_b_scot, the same could be said for a file manager - were OpenAI to expose a WebDav URI, it would be trivial to organise conversations (easily exposable as HTML files) into directories.

However, like e-mail, downsides exist. In fact, for OpenAI, the downsides of e-mail are more numerous and significant. The most important of these is e-mail’s fundamental immutability - OpenAI loses control of these messages when they are sent to you. Obviously, SingleFile makes this redundant for anyone dedicated, but OpenAI shan’t go out of their way to make it easier for you to retain your data.

Additionally, e-mail is quite expensive. Displaying the contents of a database via a JS GUI is fairly trivial computationally. Sending e-mail isn’t, especially because of its text encodement.

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The WebDAV surface is not a bad idea.

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@david_b_scot, thanks. :D