Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study (2017) (theguardian.com)

Hi HN, we’re Neha and Akash from April (https://tryapril.com). We are building an AI executive assistant to help you get through emails and manage your schedule, hands-free while you drive to work, or whenever else you prefer voice interaction.

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!

Comments (32)

wrs · 57m ago

Let me just put in a plug here for not trying to fill all of your so-called "dead time" with so-called "productive activity". Mind-wandering times like driving, showering, laundry, coffee-making, etc. can produce some of your most creative moments and may even be essential to your mental health. [0]

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662732...

mashlol · 37m ago

Definitely seems like it could be useful, but I'd be worried with giving AI write access to emails.

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.

vedhsaka · 28m ago

Valid concern - April does not write emails for you unless you specifically ask for it. Users usually dictate what they want to reply.

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.

monkeydust · 3m ago

Yes, think this needs to be way up on your priority list.

smt88 · 11m ago

Safe mode is absolutely necessary. I'd never let an LLM do things for me. They repeatedly prove that they categorically can't be jailed or trusted.

Lienetic · 1h ago

How are you handling the formatting and tone part of the email so that it doesn't sound like AI? I've tried to use AI tools for email multiple times but always end up significantly editing or rewriting the email myself.

vedhsaka · 1h ago

Yeah - April learns how you speak/correct your emails - it picks up your writing patterns and keeps evolving. The more you use it, the more it sounds like you rather than generic AI.

TheTaytay · 1h ago

This looks cool. Any chance you could wrap my Claude Code sessions as well? That's the thing I really want to be voice-driven for my commute. (serious question :) )

dizlexic · 23m ago

ooo prompt injecting with my contacts. sounds like fun.

iamflimflam1 · 2h ago

Sounds very cool. Do you have concerns around what’s Google are doing themselves in this space? What will differentiate you from them?

Hope the above doesn’t come across as negative - just interested in how you see this market developing.

vedhsaka · 2h ago

(cofounder here) Honestly, we were hoping Gemini would nail this so we wouldn't have to build it ourselves, but here we are. The main difference is we're not bounded by Google's ecosystem - we're starting with Gmail but already working on Outlook and other integrations. Also, the goal is to build an executive assistant, not just a voice client for email and calendar.

monkeydust · 2h ago

Google native AI integration to Gmail and calendar frequently disappoints be it on desktop or phone (Pixel), it's like Apple and Siri. Should be better given resources but way of base when compared to our expectations.

rockwotj · 2h ago

Shortwave has had all this and more for over a year and still nothing in Gmail.

AIorNot · 30m ago

great demo - wonder why isnt google just providing this as part of Gemini plans - I would pay money for it, why is Google so far behind on Gemini integration?

melvinmelih · 2h ago

> we could solve this dead time problem and start doing things on the go

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?

johnfn · 1h ago

Phone calls while driving are pretty clearly in the Overton window of 'safe things you can do in a car', and it doesn't seem a priori obvious to me that this is worse. Though I do agree with you that in an ideal world people wouldn't even take phone calls and would instead focus 100% of their effort on not killing me.

TheTaytay · 59m ago

There are so many times other than driving that voice is the preferred medium here. It feels like just one example. (And as others pointed out, taking a hands-free phone call during a drive is not at all provocative these days, to the point that it feels like an odd thing to fixate on personally.)

swsieber · 55m ago

Given that they dented their call while doing the demo, it doesn't seem weird to fixate on. I think the criticism is valid, given the framing presented and the pitch used to investors.

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.

vedhsaka · 19m ago

I think the car dent story originally came from - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45008239. As I clarified there - the dent happened before the April demo, during hackathon stress while taking out the car from parking.

But totally valid criticism about cognitive load - better example could be dog walking, cooking or screen free time.

vedhsaka · 1h ago

(cofounder here) Fair concern - cognitive distraction is real. We see it more like taking a phone call while driving (which people already do). We're purposely keeping interactions simple to make sure features aren't too distracting, and are working on a 'safe mode' that limits you to basic read-only operations while driving. We're actively researching attention management to make it simpler. Safety comes first.

trenchpilgrim · 1h ago

> We see it more like taking a phone call while driving (which people already do).

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!

vedhsaka · 1h ago

Got it - makes sense. The laundry example is perfect. Moments where your hands are tied or when you want screen-free time

andrewrn · 1h ago

I think I watched you guys get into the batch via the mcp hackathon yc had. Congratulations and best of luck with the startup.

vedhsaka · 17m ago

Yes Yes! The MCP hackathon was our way in. Thank you, really appreciate the support.

svota · 2h ago

How are you handling the attack vector of in-context commands[1]?

[1]: https://guard.io/labs/scamlexity-we-put-agentic-ai-browsers-... (currently on the front page)

dy5topian · 49m ago

that's a really interesting one

pacifika · 1h ago

I’ll use email filters which work when I’m not at my inbox.

ivape · 1h ago

You sound like someone who leaves reviews on Amazon for things you don't buy.

bfeynman · 2h ago

[flagged]

dang · 2h ago

> amazing that stuff like this still gets funded. This sounds like a 2 day project

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.

puma4 · 2h ago

[flagged]

dang · 2h ago

Edit: when I replied to the parent comment, it consisted of the text "she?" and nothing else. (If you're going to edit a comment once it has replies, please do it in a way that allows the replies to preserve their original context. For example, you can always add "Edit" and then post additional text.)

---- original reply: ----

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:

  “she” (sorry, I can’t help anthropomorphizing) can

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Comments (32)