Launch HN: April (YC S25) – Voice AI to manage your email and calendar
Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISKwEyuQQEo#t=50
...and here's a second one showing more complex use cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8APprJ3-eY.
While driving 40 mins daily from SF to Berkeley, my inbox would flood to 30+ emails and I'd have back-to-back meetings lined up. I'd reach work already behind, then spend another hour just catching up. We figured with recent advances in voice AI, we could solve this dead time problem and start doing things on the go.
You can just speak to April and it can:
- Summarize important emails and flag what needs attention
- Send replies that I dictate (it handles the formatting and tone)
- Review my calendar and reschedule meetings on the fly
- Pull context from email threads for each meeting
- Archive/organize emails into folders
April is built using Deepgram for STT. Eleven Labs for TTS - built on top of LiveKit. We built our own MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers for Google integration, which handle auth, rate limiting, and maintain conversation context across email threads.
The most interesting part has been optimizing for lowest latency given we are a tool call heavy application. We are also trying to optimize the interruption handling and turn taking to make it feel more natural.
April is available on the AppStore (iPhone/iPad). You can try us out here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/april-ai-executive-assistant/i...
Free 3-day trial, then $14.99/mo. We'd love feedback on: Which email /calendar workflows are most painful for you? What tools beyond Gmail & Google calendar would be most valuable with a voice interface?
We’ll be in the thread all day to answer any questions, share more technical details and learn what would make April most useful to you. Comment away!
But the situation where emails are backing upload as you drive to work and back to back meetings sounds like a mismanaged workplace.
The real impact (not a startup idea really) is fixing whatever makes the workplace like that. Usually everyone needs to be involved in everything and bad meeting management. Could be bad prioritisation and taking on too much work. Could be busywork.
If AI could solve those problems or help it might be good.
There is a category of users who have to deal with emails and meetings as a primary part of their job. For instance our power user is a Head of Sales who uses April to just get a rundown of his day and get context about his customers before the meeting. It's his typical workday and wouldn't be a mismanaged workplace.
Is there a good audit trail of exactly what actions it takes at each step? I'd personally be worried about leaking proprietary or otherwise private information this way, or having it hallucinate information when it sends out emails potentially causing catastrophic issues.
But do you think a 'safe mode' - where April does only non destructive operation like read/summarize/draft/move emails to a folder would help you build trust?
It's in our pipeline - we can prioritize it to mitigate that fear.
Feel free to take the idea, if it's helpful. No credit/rights necessary. Y'all are much farther along than I am and if you come out with an Android app I'll probably end up a customer!
What if it thinks you asked for it?
AI is still not at the point where I am comfortable letting it run free with my email, but a draft that I can read over and make changes to before sending it out is a game changer.
I think I represent a typical office employee where I get maybe a dozen emails at work and a few calendar invites. Nothing I can't get through in the first 10 minutes of work in the morning. Usually emails that take time are those that I can't outsource to AI anyway.
Nevertheless congrats on the launch and best of luck.
However, I did notice that connect took around a minute to a minute and a half before the agent was in the call and able to speak. Is this a byproduct of the underlying calling service you're using or the traffic?
Regardless, awesome app, curious to see how it continues to improve!
Hope the above doesn’t come across as negative - just interested in how you see this market developing.
Interesting idea, but how do you address car safety concerns? Studies consistently show that cognitive distraction, even with voice interfaces, can significantly increase crash risk. Wouldn’t managing emails and calendars while driving still fall into that category?
And which we know is highly unsafe: https://unews.utah.edu/up-to-27-seconds-of-inattention-after...
Maybe you can talk about other "dead time" without safety impact - e.g. doing my laundry involves low mental workload but my hands aren't free!
Also, audio interfaces incur different amounts of mental load / distraction. I wouldn't be surprised if this was more distracting than just talking to a person.
But totally valid criticism about cognitive load - better example could be dog walking, cooking or screen free time.
[1]: https://guard.io/labs/scamlexity-we-put-agentic-ai-browsers-... (currently on the front page)
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...
The other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008239) appeared by coincidence. It looks like it spent quite a few hours on the frontpage overnight, but I had no idea it existed! In any case the Launch HN was scheduled before that.
(Btw, I don't think that "using it made them crash" is correct - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45010327)
Ai yai yai - you can't dismiss someone's work that way, especially not in launch threads. HN has additional rules when people are sharing their work, because it's particularly important not to be a jerk in such threads. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html as well as https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it. Thoughtful criticism is fine, of course, but supercilious dismissals are something we'd really like people to avoid here.
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Can you please not post like this? We want substantive, thoughtful discussion on this site.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: the top text had this bit which I've replaced now:
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