Superhuman upgrades AI auto-draft feature to sound less robotic

Email client Superhuman is launching a new version of its auto-draft feature, which identifies important emails and creates draft replies that sound less robotic. The company has attempted this before, with features like instant replies and follow-up auto-drafts, but many of those earlier drafts read like an overly enthusiastic AI salesperson. The new version feels different: during beta testing over the past few days, some generated drafts required little to no editing before being sent.

The feature identifies which emails might need a reply and drafts a response based on the user’s tone from previous conversations, while also generating two alternative variations. In testing, drafts included agreeing to embargoes on a pitch to get more details, confirming meeting times, and responding to requests for an authored post on TechCrunch by noting the outlet doesn’t accept authored posts.

The feature is far from perfect. By default, it sometimes generated a positive response to a pitch or agreed to a meeting at a post-midnight time — though users can quickly swap in one of the other generated variations. The feature also learns from usage: after one such midnight-meeting mistake, it later generated a draft declining a similarly timed request. Users can personalize the tool via Settings > Personalization, adding details about themselves, their role, and supporting files or links for more context.

Superhuman co-founder Rahul Vohra said that during testing, 40% of auto-generated drafts were sent within one day, and 60% of those were sent without any manual editing. Vohra said earlier features like Instant Replies ran on older models such as GPT-3.5, which were less intelligent and had smaller context windows. “Today, we are using a mixture of models to make this work. The actual writing is done by frontier models from both Anthropic and OpenAI. So we’re applying the maximum amount of intelligence and context to this that we possibly can to make the feature work,” Vohra said. Grammarly acquired Superhuman last year and rebranded the company as Superhuman; it is now building a cross-platform assistant called Superhuman Go that carries context from one app to another.

Why it matters

As more inbound email is itself AI-drafted, tools like Superhuman’s auto-draft — now built on frontier models from multiple labs — could meaningfully cut the time professionals spend managing high-volume inboxes.