Email overload isn’t new, but the tools we use to deal with it haven’t evolved much in decades. Desktop apps have long tried to help people reach “inbox zero,” yet most of us still end up skimming messages on our phones, promising ourselves we’ll reply later. A new mobile email app called Avec wants to make that daily inbox grind faster and more intuitive by combining swipe-based triage with voice-powered replies.
Avec, launching first on iOS, rethinks email as a stack of swipeable cards. Each message appears like a card you can act on in seconds: swipe left to place it into a “handle later” pile, or swipe right to mark it done and archive it. The goal is simple—move through your inbox quickly without getting stuck composing long replies on a tiny keyboard.
One of Avec’s standout features is its voice reply button built directly into the email experience. While going through your messages, you can press and hold a button at the bottom of the card stack, speak your reply, and release to generate a transcribed draft. The app then shows you the draft so you can check for transcription errors, tweak wording, and hit send.
Avec argues that this built-in approach matters because it has full context about the email thread you’re answering. That context helps it better recognize names, adjust edits to match the tone of the conversation, and learn your personal writing style over time. The company positions this as an advantage over voice or dictation tools that rely on separate keyboard extensions and may be limited by platform constraints.
Inbox cleanup isn’t only about replying—it’s also about filtering out the noise. Avec includes an “unimportant” action you can trigger by swiping down on an email. Over time, the app learns from what you consistently mark as low-priority and can group similar messages together so you’re not forced to triage every newsletter or routine notification one by one.
Although the swipeable card interface is the signature experience, Avec also offers a traditional list-based inbox view for people who prefer familiar email navigation. In other words, it’s not forcing everyone into one workflow—it’s offering a faster path for people who want it, without removing the classic format entirely.
The app was created by Jonathan Unikowksi, a former product engineer at Replit. He’s said the motivation came from wanting to build tools he’d personally use every day. After exploring other ideas, he focused on email because it remains one of the most universal (and universally disliked) parts of modern life. In his view, the core email experience hasn’t meaningfully changed in about 25 years, and a mix of strong design and carefully applied AI could significantly improve how people manage their inboxes.
Avec isn’t the only company trying to modernize email. Several services have experimented with new ways to present messages and reduce inbox stress, and some have tried to rebuild email from the ground up. But Avec’s bet is that the biggest opportunity is on mobile, where most people check email constantly but hate typing and sorting through clutter.
Unikowksi has framed the mobile-first decision as a product advantage: phones have stricter constraints—small screens, no physical keyboard, fewer shortcuts—which pushes teams to be more inventive. And because convincing someone to switch email apps is difficult, the experience has to feel meaningfully better right away.
Right now, Avec is available in the U.S. and free for Gmail users, with Outlook support in development. The company plans to introduce paid tiers in the future, though it’s still deciding which premium features will be included.
With $8.4 million raised so far from investors such as Lightspeed and Haystack, along with participation from notable tech operators and creators, Avec is positioning itself as a serious contender in the race to build a faster, smarter mobile email client. For anyone tired of drowning in messages, the combination of swipe-to-triage and voice-based replies could be a practical way to finally make progress on the inbox—one card at a time.
