Automatic secretary to help tame out-of-control inboxes

Techies have come up with a new planning tool that can help sort urgent messages in an overflowing inbox.

Andrew Faulring and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have developed the Reflective Agents with Distributed Adaptive Reasoning (Radar) system to help manage bloated email box.

The tool depends on human trainers to figure out the type of words that may lead to the characterisation of the tasks involved, such as organising a conference and marking priorities, New Scientist reported.

The system then scans a user's inbox and sorts the emails in line of their significance.

Faulring observed volunteers using the tool significantly outperformed their unaided counterparts and also made fewer mistakes.

The findings were presented at the Intelligent User Interfaces conference in Hong Kong, China.