Over 100 billion work e-mails are exchanged each day, but research suggests that only around a quarter of those are actually essential. IBM hopes to lighten that load. Later this month the company will open up a trial of a new online e-mail service called Verse, which uses algorithms to work out which messages and people are most important to you.+
After Verse is launched as a product sometime this spring, IBM plans to add a personal assistant powered by the Watson software that beat two human Jeopardy! champions in 2011. The finished version of the service will be free for personal or small-business use, but larger companies will have to pay, depending on data usage and the number of users.
Image: IBM’s new e-mail service, Verse, tries to understand which people matter to you most.
