Higher education
75% faster email replies
Dr Laura Vella · University of Melbourne
- RAG
- Pinecone
- Email automation
Academic inboxes never sleep. Between students, collaborators, and committees, Dr Laura Vella was spending hours each week on email — and every reply had to sound like her.
The challenge
Generic AI drafts miss the mark. They don’t know the history with a particular contact, they flatten tone, and they need so much editing that they rarely save any time at all.
What we built
A retrieval-augmented assistant grounded in Dr Vella’s own correspondence:
- Voice modelling — the system studies her past writing to match phrasing, structure, and tone.
- Context retrieval — a Pinecone vector database surfaces the relevant thread history and reference material for each message.
- Tone adaptation — replies shift automatically depending on whether she’s writing to a student, a peer, or an external body.
The outcome
Replies that used to take hours now take minutes — and the drafts genuinely sound like her, not a template.
“The email RAG system has been a lifesaver! It’s like having a personal assistant who knows exactly how I want to communicate.”
— Dr Laura Vella, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne