Another Inbox tool is an improved way to do reminders. When you need something done, you create a reminder that takes its place at the top of the inbox. If you want to put it off, you can “snooze” it to a later time, or even specify that the reminder should reappear at the top when you get to your home or your office or anywhere else. For example, you could create a reminder to get some aspirin and “snooze” the message until you are near a CVS, at which point (assuming you have okayed location tracking on your phone) the reminder will reactivate. Inbox also empowers reminders with a feature called “assist,” which eases the pain of performing the specific tasks. For instance, if you remind yourself to contact a company’s customer service department, Inbox (drawing on Google’s search prowess) will locate the elusive number that might connect you with an actual human being. (No guarantee on this, I assume.)

As of now, Inbox doesn’t do anything to make composing mail more powerful, and that’s too bad; chances are that in many cases Google might have been able to divine context well enough to write a reasonable first draft for many standard replies.

Gawley says that Inbox’s road map includes composition and such. (Maybe in an update called “Outbox”? ) Meanwhile, Inbox does make it easier to choose who to send mail to, as it extracts what it thinks are your favorite contacts and stacks them separately for easy contact.

Google is launching Inbox iOS and Android phones, and on the web on desktop via Chrome. (Versions for tablets and other browsers are in the works.) As with the original Gmail, the release will involve an invite process that allows a gradual rollout while using scarcity to generate demand. The question is how big that demand can grow. The practice of rolling out an innovative alternative to a product via an app has been tried before — notably with Facebook’s Pages. It has the advantage of introducing a radical change to product used by hundreds of millions without upsetting the faithful. But typically, only a fraction of those users leave the mainstay to try an edgy new version. Eventually, some of the features migrate to the main stage.

But the sense that I got from talking to the team leaders is that they believe pretty much everyone should want to use Inbox. “Generally, with those people who feel their inbox is a lot of work, they will get a ton of value by switching wholesale to Inbox,” says Gawley, who clearly views this as the future of email, at least at Google. “This is the start of us thinking about Inbox for the next ten years.”

Watch for that evolution to nudge Inbox even closer to Google Now so that the concept of email itself blurs, as the origin of information becomes less important than how we use it and what it means to us. In the meantime, we can celebrate one aspect of this new product, a wrinkle that will be welcomed by those who have been using its older sibling.

Inbox, at least as of now, has no ads.

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