Human email assistant could streamline your life

摘要

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.