Avec brings Tinder-style swipes to email with voice AI

The timing makes sense. Mobile email usage has exploded, but the experience hasn't kept pace. Most email apps were designed for desktop and adapted for mobile as an afterthought. Avec flips that model, building mobile-first with gestures that already feel natural to anyone who's used a dating app in the past decade.

But the swipe interface isn't just aesthetic. It's a bet on speed over intelligence. While Google and Microsoft have invested billions in AI to automatically categorize and prioritize email, Avec is betting that sometimes the fastest way through your inbox is just making quick decisions, one swipe at a time.

The voice transcription feature addresses another mobile email pain point. Research shows people read email on phones but often wait until they're at a computer to respond, creating lag in communication. If Avec can make voice replies feel natural and accurate, it could eliminate that friction entirely.

The app enters a crowded market that's seen waves of email innovation come and go. Mailbox famously pioneered gesture-based email before shutting down in 2015. Inbox by Gmail bundled messages into categories before Google killed it in 2019. The graveyard of email apps is littered with good ideas that couldn't gain enough traction.

What might be different this time is the maturity of voice AI. Earlier attempts at voice-to-email were clunky and error-prone. Modern large language models can handle context, tone, and formatting in ways that weren't possible even three years ago. If Avec's transcription works well enough, it could create a genuinely new email behavior.

The consumer productivity space has heated up considerably. Superhuman built a business around premium email for power users, charging $30 per month for keyboard shortcuts and read receipts. Hey from Basecamp reimagined email screening and organization. Avec is aiming for a different demographic: people who want email to feel as frictionless as scrolling Instagram, not as powerful as a command-line interface.

Lightspeed's involvement signals that venture capitalists see room for innovation in spaces that seemed settled. Email felt like a solved problem dominated by tech giants. But the success of tools like Notion, Airtable, and Linear proved that even established categories can be reimagined with better design and mobile-first thinking.

The question is whether swiping through email will feel liberating or exhausting. Dating apps work because each swipe is low-stakes and potentially exciting. Email is higher-stakes and rarely exciting. Applying the same interface to both assumes the gesture is what matters, not the content. That's a bold bet, but in a world where people check their phones 96 times per day, maybe speed and familiarity matter more than we think.

Avec is making a counterintuitive bet: that the solution to email overload isn't smarter AI filtering, but faster human decision-making wrapped in familiar gestures. If the voice transcription works as promised and the swipe interface feels natural after the novelty wears off, the app could carve out a niche among mobile-first users tired of typing. But history suggests email apps need more than clever UX to survive. They need to change behavior so fundamentally that going back feels impossible. Whether swiping through your inbox will feel that essential remains to be seen, but at minimum, Avec is asking the right question: why should email feel harder than finding a date?