10 Best AI Email Summarizer Tools [2024]
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Customer support agents receive a ton of emails every day. Sorting through each one, trying to understand the context, and keeping track of long conversation histories—it’s all incredibly time-consuming. It’s easy to see how this can eat into the hours that could be better spent actually helping customers.
Thankfully, many customer support tools now come with a handy feature: an AI email summarizer. It’s basically a technology that can help quickly summarize conversations and tickets, giving support staff the key points they need to resolve issues without having to wade through lengthy email chains.
In this guide, I’m going to share with you the best AI email summarizers I’ve come across for customer support. I’ll walk you through how they work, what makes them stand out, and how they can help your team save time and improve efficiency. Let’s dive in!
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Top 10 AI Email Summarizer Tools
There are a variety of AI summarizer tools out there that can help you quickly grasp the context of emails. While most of these tools focus on the same core function—condensing email threads—each one has its own unique strengths. In this comparison, I’ve tried to highlight those differences, so you can find the tool that’s the best fit for your business needs.
1. Hiver AI Summarizer
Hiver is a customer support tool designed for teams that use Gmail and Outlook. In other words, Hiver can turn your Gmail or Outlook inbox into a support platform.
One of its standout features is AI Summarizer, which converts long email conversations into brief, easy-to-read notes. This makes it a lot simpler for support teams to stay on top of customer conversations without having to go through every response in an email thread.
It’s a helpful tool, especially when you’re dealing with a lot of emails every day. It makes it easier to share context when agents need to hand off a conversation, so the next person can jump right in without missing a beat. This means less backtracking and more time spent helping customers.
For supervisors, it’s a great way to quickly understand what’s going on in long or complicated email threads. This comes in handy especially when handling escalated issues.
Hiver also takes privacy seriously, filtering out sensitive information before sending the email to OpenAI for summarization. This ensures that your data remains secure and that you can trust the summarizer to handle your conversations with care.
Using it is a quick 3-step process:
Step 1: Just click the wand icon at the top of any email conversation to generate a summary.
Step 2: The AI Summarizer then shows you a concise summary of the conversation, which you can copy into an email or save as a note.
Step 3: You can tweak the summary, tag a team member if needed, and save it as a note for future reference.
Note: AI Summarizer currently supports up to 50 conversations per day and works only in English. It generates summaries based on the content of the emails in the thread, including any bullet points or important details.
Pricing:
Two of Hiver’s plans allow you to access the AI Summarizer feature. The Pro plan which starts at $49, and the Elite plan which is $79 per user per month. There’s also a 7-day free trial, which is perfect if you want to test out the AI Summarizer and see if it fits your needs before committing. Our customer support team is available 24/7 for any questions you might have.
2. SaneBox Digest
SaneBox is an email management tool that helps you take control of your inbox and reduce clutter. It comes with an AI email summarizer, which is part of the SaneBox Digest feature.
The Daily Digest is a summary sent to you once a day. It focuses on the less important emails that you haven’t opened yet. SaneBox automatically filters these emails into a folder called SaneLater. The Digest gives you a quick overview of these emails, making it easier to decide if there’s anything you need to look at or if you can safely ignore them.
By summarizing the unimportant emails that have stayed unread, SaneBox helps you wade through your inbox faster and ensures you haven’t missed out on anything important.
One drawback, however, with SaneBox’s AI summarizer feature is that it is mainly focused on unimportant emails, so it might not be as useful for those looking to get summaries of all their emails. Also, the Digest is sent only once a day by default which means you can’t get the summary whenever you want to.
“The daily summary design isn’t visually appealing. I tend to gloss over it, in fact, it doesn’t add much value. The user interface inside the app could be prettier, but I rarely go into it anyway. All the value of Sanebox is the fact that my inbox is 100% under control with zero effort.” –SaneBox User Review | G2
Pricing:
No matter which plan you choose—whether it’s the Snack plan at $3.49 per month, the Lunch plan at $5.99, or the Dinner plan at $16.99—you’ll have access to this feature. A free trial is available for 14 days.
3. Help Scout AI Summarize
Help Scout is an all-in-one customer support platform for small businesses. Its AI Summarize feature, powered by OpenAI, gives you a quick summary of any conversation.
All you need to do is select a conversation and then click the AI Summarize button at the top for you to get all the context on what’s being discussed.
There are a few things to keep in mind, though. Since it’s still in beta, you might run into some inaccuracies or errors in the summaries. If something doesn’t look right, it’s a good idea to check the original conversation.
And while you can run Help Scout’s AI summarize on conversations in different languages, the summary itself will always be in English. More importantly, if and when new replies are added to an existing conversation thread, the summary won’t update automatically. You’ll have to click on the update icon in the summary window.
One last thing: while AI Summarize uses OpenAI, your conversation data isn’t used to train their models. The data is stored by OpenAI for up to 30 days, but only for generating the summaries within Help Scout.
Pricing:
This feature is available to all users on the Plus and Pro plans, except for those using the HIPAA compliance feature. The Plus plan costs $50 per user each month, while the Pro plan is $65 per user per month but is only available if you choose an annual subscription. The free trial for Help Scout is available for 15 days.
4. Freshworks Email Conversation Summarizer
Freshworks is a customer service suite of products that helps companies – ranging from startups to enterprises – scale their support operations across multiple touchpoints. One of its important features is the Email Conversation Summarizer.
Support teams can use this feature to generate a summary of any email conversation. The clear and concise summaries make it easier to handoff queries between support staff and for other teams to jump in when needed, without having to share the context of emails every single time. This is especially helpful when multiple people are working on the same issue.
To use the Summarizer:
- Go to the admin page and navigate to general settings. Then click on “Freddy” to access the Freddy AI features page.
- Find the “Email Conversation Summarizer” under Copilot, and use the toggle switch to turn it on or off.
- Just click the “Summarize” button in the reply editor, and a summary of the email conversation will be generated. You can modify the summary if needed.
- After reviewing the summary, click “Send” to share it with other teams or the next agent who will handle the case.
Pricing:
This feature is available as an add-on for Freddy Copilot. If you’re on the Pro ($69/agent/month) or Enterprise ($109/agent/month) plan and interested in this feature, you can contact your account manager or check your billing page to purchase the add-on. There’s a 14-day free trial for new users.
5. Superhuman Auto Summarize
Superhuman is an AI-powered email management tool, and one of its standout features is called “Auto Summarize.”
With Auto Summarize, every email conversation gets a 1-line summary right at the top. It’s super handy because as new emails come in, the summary updates instantly. If you ever need more details, all you have to do is hit the “M” key, and you’ll see more of the conversation.
To start using it, just reload Superhuman, open any conversation, and hit “M” on your keyword. Once you do this, all your conversations will automatically have a summary.
The only disadvantage, in my view, would be the accuracy of its 1-line summary. Because Auto Summarize condenses emails into a single line, there’s a risk of missing out on important context or nuances. For emails with multiple topics or intricate details, the summary might not capture the full essence of the conversation, which could lead to misunderstandings.
Pricing:
Superhuman’s Auto Summarize feature is included in all of their pricing plans. The Starter plan costs $25 per user per month, and the Business plan is $33 per user per month. If you’re interested in the Enterprise plan, you’ll need to reach out to their team directly for pricing details. They also offer a 30-day free trial.
“The AI support in Superhuman is clutch, especially when you’re writing an email that you need help with (be it reduction of emotional content, reduction of message length, or simply content generation). But even better is the AI summary of long threads. This is a massive time-saver and helps to be focused on the primary points.” –Superhuman User Review | G2
6. Zendesk Summarization
Zendesk is a popular customer support tool, especially for large businesses and enterprises. It’s packed with AI-powered features, and one of them is the Summarization feature.
It provides a recap of all the public comments on a ticket, so that your support staff can quickly get up to speed without having to read through the entire thread. This is especially handy when there are multiple comments or when an agent takes over a ticket from someone else. Just keep in mind that it only summarizes public comments—not internal notes and side conversations
To use it, you simply click the “Intelligence” icon in the context panel within a ticket and then hit “Summarize conversation.” If new public comments are added, you can refresh the summary by clicking the same icon and hitting “Refresh.”
Zendesk’s AI Summarizer feature has some limitations.
For example, it only works if the ticket has fewer than 24,000 words. Also, for messaging and chat tickets, it only kicks in after the conversation has ended or gone inactive since that’s when the transcript gets added to the ticket.
When I checked the support page, I noticed that some users have experienced the summarization unexpectedly switching languages, even when both the ticket and agent settings are set to English.
Others have complained about the summaries being too long or including irrelevant information.
It’s important to note that the feature is still in beta and so, it’s not without bugs. For now, it does a fairly good job at summarizing conversations but don’t expect it to be fully accurate at all times.
Pricing:
The AI summarizer is part of Zendesk’s Advanced AI add-on, which costs $50 per agent per month. This add-on is only available in its higher-tier plans: Zendesk Support and Suite plans, which start at $115 per agent per month. The lower-tier Support Team and Suite Team plans do not qualify for the Advanced AI add-on.
7. Zoho Desk Email Summarize
Zoho Desk is a multi-channel help desk that helps companies support their customers across email, chat, phone, and other touchpoints. It also comes with an AI assistant called Zia and one of Zia’s core functionalities is helping summarize emails into concise notes.
It is best used for getting a gist of lengthy emails, highlighting key points in long conversations, and even for suggesting next steps. You can even use Zia to summarize emails from your POP, IMAP, and delegated mail accounts, which is great if you manage multiple inboxes.
The setup process is straightforward:
- Log in to Zoho Mail and navigate to your inbox or any other folder.
- Pick the email you want summarized.
- Hit the Summarize button at the top of the email preview, and Zia will generate a summary for you.
- From there, you can: share the summary in the comment section, create a new task with the summary as the task description, or even copy the summary to share or save.
The integration of Zia with OpenAI features is currently limited to certain regions (e.g., US data centers),which may restrict access for users in other locations.
Pricing:
The AI email summarizer feature is available in the Professional ($35/user/month) and Enterprise ($50/user/month) plans but is not accessible in the Free or Standard plans. Users interested in utilizing this feature will need to opt for one of the higher-tier plans.
8. Kustomer Conversation Summaries
Kustomer is a customer service platform that includes a really useful AI email summarizer feature called Conversation Summaries. This feature is part of their Kustomer AI Labs app and uses OpenAI to automatically summarize the key points from long conversations.
Conversation Summaries comes in handy when a customer is handed off from a chatbot to a human support staff, or between different agents. In such scenarios, the employee taking over the customer ticket doesn’t have to read through the entire conversation. Instead, they can go through the summary that highlights the most important details about the ticket. This helps support teams save a lot of time and effort in managing customer issues.
Pricing:
This feature is included in the Enterprise and Ultimate plans, which are priced at $89 and $139 per month per user, respectively. A 14-day free trial is available.
9. Mailbutler Smart Summarize
Mailbutler is an email extension that adds practical features to your Apple Mail, Gmail, or Outlook, helping you manage emails more efficiently right in your inbox.
It has an AI email summary feature known as Smart Summarize, which can scan your emails and instantly give you an overview of the key points. This ensures that you don’t have to read every response in an email thread to know what’s important.
To use Smart Summarize, you just pick an email you want to summarize, then click the “Summarize” button in your Mailbutler Sidebar. It will generate a description of the email, giving you a quick summary of what it’s all about. If you want to keep that summary handy, you can turn it into an email note by clicking “Create note” in the Sidebar. This way, you can attach the summary as a note to the email itself.
I’ve found that Smart Summarize works best on long, plain-text emails like project updates, job applications, or sales offers. Once you’ve got the summary, you can share it with your team to keep everyone on the same page.
The Smart Assistant can process emails in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German, which is great if you’re dealing with international clients. Just keep in mind that while the summaries are shorter than the original emails, they can still be lengthy if the email contains a lot of information.
Pricing:
Mailbutler’s Smart Summarize feature is available exclusively on the Smart ($14.95/user/month) and Business ($32.95/user/month) pricing plans, which are also its higher-tier plans. It also offers a 14-day free trial.
10. Tidio Reply Assistant
Tidio is an all-in-one customer experience solution. Its Reply Assistant, integrated into the helpdesk, uses AI to generate responses based on the agent’s input. It can also create summaries of ongoing ticket communications.
When you’re working on a customer ticket, you’ll notice a magic wand button that gives you two options: Reply Assistant and Insert Summary.
The Reply Assistant helps you craft well-phrased responses by paraphrasing your input.
But what really stands out is the Insert Summary option. This feature generates a summary of the entire ticket thread, which can be a lifesaver if you need to leave a internal note or quickly get up to speed on what’s happened so far.
One thing to keep in mind, however, is that this summarization feature is designed specifically for Tidio’s Helpdesk. It’s great for managing customer support tickets, but it’s not really built for broader email management tasks outside of this context. Also, if you’re using the Tidio mobile app, this feature is only available for customer conversations that happen via chat, and not for other support channels. You’ll need to use the desktop version to use the summarizer feature for tickets across all touchpoints.
Pricing:
The email summarizer is part of Tidio’s core customer service offering and is available across all its plans – Free, Starter, Growth, Tidio+, and Enterprise plans. Pricing starts at $29/user/month and goes up to $2999/user/month. A 7-day free trial is also available.
Find The Right AI Summarizer Tool
I hope this roundup of the top AI email summarizer tools gives you a clear understanding of how these tools can help streamline your customer support efforts. Each tool offers unique features designed to save time and improve the efficiency of your team. While AI summarizers are effective for processing emails quickly, integrating the best email management software can provide additional tools for organizing, prioritizing, and managing your inbox more efficiently.
I encourage you to take advantage of the free trials available for these tools. Experiment with them, and see which one fit your needs best. By finding the right tool, you’ll be better equipped to handle customer inquiries swiftly and effectively.
