Yahoo Mail! Joins the Generative AI Push

Yahoo! Mail is rolling out one of its biggest changes in years by introducing AI-powered features that include a new tab that highlights and summarizes your most important emails. 

The changes are part of a visual overhaul to Yahoo! Mail’s desktop experience announced on Tuesday. Users will see a “cleaner, more intuitive design” and a new Priority tab in their inbox.

The Priority tab is designed to harness generative AI to “automatically highlight the most important messages first, along with AI-generated, one-line summaries of an email’s contents,” Yahoo says.

The AI-generated summary will appear at the top of an opened email in the Priority tab, along with a recommendation on how to respond. In one example, the feature is able to scan and comprehend an email about an upcoming soccer camp for kids, while supplying the recommended action in an easy-to-read bullet point summary. 

Yahoo’s AI system is also smart enough to generate a “quick action” button depending on the content of the email. For example, if you receive an email about an upcoming event, Yahoo! Mail will place a quick action button to let you add the event to your calendar with a single click. The same feature can also generate quick buttons to copy a verification code or check in for a flight. 

Yahoo says it wants to help users conquer overstuffed inboxes. But we’ll have to see if AI-generated tech will generate helpful summaries. It’s also unclear which AI model Yahoo is using to power the email features and whether it’s tapping customer email data to train any AI programs. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Yahoo’s announcement says the overhauled desktop experience is rolling out now. However, it doesn’t look like the company is forcing the changes. Instead, they’ll “have the chance to opt-in over the coming months; the mobile app experience will follow,” Yahoo said.