Write Professional Emails in English - Using AI to Write Emails

Welcome to this supplementary lesson on using AI and whether it can actually be used to compose emails

At the moment, you'll probably notice that AI is seeing a lot of hype right now

And the question that we want to ask is, can we use this AI to create emails for Business English

and in this lesson we'll specifically look at chat gpt for this and i i personally think the results

will surprise you a quick look at chat gpt before we start so one of the best aspects and the biggest and

most important aspects of chat gpt is that it remembers the previous parts of the conversation

When I say conversation, I mean what it types, what you type and what it generates

So what this means is, is that you don't have to re-enter all of the details

We don't get involved in a massive sort of copy-paste exercise. And in this respect, it really behaves more like a person, in a sense you have a conversation with a person

And the important thing with the use of this tool is really the framing of the question

And I would also like to point out, although I give a brief introduction to ChatGPT, this is not an AI course

So if you're interested in finding out more about this, there's plenty of courses that you can access for deeper and more detailed information on this topic

We'll point out that ChatGPT is constantly being updated, which means that if you use the same input as we show in the examples, you might end up with a different output, and that's okay

at the time of writing chat gpt is free to use but you do need to register it with an email address

and you will need to log in to use it and of course you can access it at chat.openai.com

then you can just follow the the prompts on the screen so look at some examples

In the first example, we'll use the AI to generate an email

And here's the input. So this is what I asked it to do. So write a business email thanking Dr. Ben Brown for his invitation

Tell him that you can meet Tuesday and suggest Thursday as an alternative And as you can see I been deliberately lazy with the input So there no uppercase

there's very poor punctuation. We haven't had to make it sort of grammatically correct

as a starting point. This is deliberate. And what did the program generate

Dear Dr. Brown, thank you for your invitation. I'm sorry to inform you that I'm not available on Tuesday

However, I would be available on Thursday if that works for you. Please let me know if Thursday is a suitable alternative, and I look forward to hearing from you soon

Thank you again for the invitation, and I apologize for any inconvenience

Best regards, your name. This is exactly copy-pasted from the output of the program

So a couple of things to notice here is it's actually quite good

Dear Dr. Brown, best regards, comma. So we have the matching commas above and below

Starts with a large letter. Thank you is uppercase. Says what needs to be done

For me, the only thing I would maybe criticise is that I would use Dr. Brown and it's a very formal tone

which for me you should probably end with your sincerely not best regards so best regards is

maybe a little bit sort of informal and for me it doesn't really fit but other than that no problems

now having said that i think oh that's a bit too formal maybe i'd like a more informal tone

so I provide a new input and this is all I've put in make it informal okay that's all all the

rest of the context is there and the chat GPT knows what it is that needs to be made informal

I don't have to sort of copy and paste and say write an informal email just say make it informal

which is kind of good. So, and here's what the AI generated

Hey Ben, thanks for the invite. Unfortunately, I won't be able to make it on Tuesday

But what do you say we meet up on Thursday instead? Let me know if that works for you

Talk to you soon. Your name. So, I've taken the text and generated it

in an informal version. And this is informal Again it got the correct formatting comma above comma below hey Ben comma talk to you soon comma thanks for the invite uppercase T

It actually looks good. Here's where maybe we come across some things that don't quite do what we want it to do

So up until now, it's all been in American English. so we've had doctor full stop brown whereas the Brits would put doctor without the full stop

and apologize was written with a z so we say okay I now want it in UK English so I provide a new

input I say write the formal version in UK English so we've had two versions we had the formal the

informal. I haven't had to say the first or the second, just the formal, and it knows which the

formal is. This is all good stuff. Again, no more details are needed, just this. It's almost like

you're having a conversation with a person. And here's what AI generates. Dear Dr. Brown

thank you very much for extending the invitation. I regret to inform you that I'm unavailable on

Tuesday. However, I would be available on Thursday if that is amenable to you. Please do let me know

if Thursday is a suitable alternative and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Thank you once

again for the invitation and I apologise for any inconvenience caused. Best regards, your name

hmm it's definitely a more formal tone but dr brown has got the foot the full stop after doctor

which is the american version not the uk version and apologize is spelt with a z not an s so it

hasn't actually done what we were asked it to do it's just made a more formal version of its first

try. And again, it's got best regards instead of yours sincerely, which is what we would expect

with a formal mail where, or a formal email or letter where the person is named. We expect it

to end in yours sincerely. So if we were going to use this, we'd have to sort of edit it a bit

We'd remove the full stop from Dr. Brown. We'd change apologize from a Z to an S. We'd change

best regards. However, these are small changes, and the main bulk of the email is kind of usable

and good Now let look at something that worrying for me So I call it a warning So this is not necessarily to do with emails

but just to show you as a sort of a warning what can go wrong

So I asked about common mistakes for learners, and it generated me a whole load of stuff

But this excerpt in the middle is the one I want to point out to you

And it said, one of the most common grammar mistakes that people make is subject verb agreement errors

And that's true. For example, he don't know the answer is incorrect

It should be, he doesn't know the answer. Absolutely correct. No argument there

another common mistake is the misuse of it's and it's and there there and there again absolutely

true but then it does this for example i can't find my phone it's lost is incorrect and it should

be i can't find my phone it's without an apostrophe lost it's exactly the wrong way round

the it's apostrophe s is short for it is and the it's without an apostrophe is the possessive form

and this is exactly the wrong way round okay so please be careful with what it generates it won't

be perfect and it won't be flawless do not just take it copy paste and use it okay you have to

really be careful with the output and this is a good example showing this

this is a brief summary modern AI is an interesting tool for people who need to write in English

however it's still a tool and should be treated as such and the example I usually give here is that the best hammer in the world won't help you

if you need to remove a screw it's just the wrong tool for the job

I would say that AI can be used to generate standard emails for common situations

And as such, it is a help to anyone who's needing to write English emails

However, as you've seen in the last couple of things, please, please, please check the output

And if necessary, edit it and check it again before you click send

so have a play with the tool if you haven't already you'll find it, I think it's interesting

it's great what it can do but use it with caution