InboxZero

Inspiration

Every professional I know drowns in email. We spend 2+ hours daily just reading and deciding — not actually doing. I wanted to build an agent that doesn't just summarize email, but acts on it autonomously.

What it does

InboxZero is an agentic AI that connects to your Gmail and:

• 📋 Classifies every unread email (Urgent / Action Required / Meeting / FYI / Spam)
• ✉️ Drafts context-aware replies in your tone
• 📅 Creates calendar events from meeting requests automatically
• ⭐ Flags urgent emails for immediate attention
• 📤 Sends replies with one-click human approval

All powered by Amazon Nova 2 Lite via Amazon Bedrock.

How I built it

• Amazon Nova 2 Lite (via Amazon Bedrock converse API) — the core reasoning brain for email classification and reply generation
• LangChain ReAct — agentic loop orchestration
• Gmail API + Google Calendar API — real inbox access and calendar actions
• Streamlit — clean, demo-ready UI
• Python — backend glue

Nova 2 Lite was chosen for its blazing speed and instruction-following accuracy — critical when processing 10–20 emails in a single agentic loop without blowing the budget.

Challenges I ran into

• Gmail OAuth scopes needed careful configuration for both read and send permissions
• Getting Nova to return strict JSON every time required prompt engineering with explicit system instructions
• Handling multipart MIME email bodies with encoding edge cases

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

• Built a fully working agentic loop that reads real email and takes real actions end-to-end
• Nova's structured output quality meant near-zero hallucinations in email classification
• The UI lets non-technical users approve AI actions safely — human always stays in the loop

What I learned

• Amazon Nova 2 Lite is remarkably fast for agentic workflows — latency per email is under 1 second
• The converse API in Bedrock is clean and easy to integrate
• Agentic AI shines when the tools are real (actual Gmail, actual Calendar)

What's next for InboxZero

• Add Nova 2 Sonic for voice-controlled email triage ("Hey InboxZero, handle my morning email")
• Slack and Outlook integration
• Learning user's reply style over time for personalized drafts
• Mobile app with push notifications for urgent flags

Built With

• amazon-bedrock
• amazon-nova-2-lite
• boto3
• gmail-api
• google-calendar-api
• python
• streamlit