14 ms·

Computer, Respond to This Email

562 points by dpf 11y ago

icey 11y ago
I just started reading Avogadro Corp (http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears-ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea...) this weekend, and this reminds me quite a lot of the emergent AI that figures heavily in the story (ELOPe). A quick synopsis: developers build a system to "improve" responses from emails. The system at some point is given the ability to send emails on its own, and a poorly issued directive. It's been an engaging read so far, and fairly hilarious since the corporation in the book is very obviously based on Google.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  You'll love the ending. I highly recommend you read the sequel as well: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FZVI2M/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FZVI2M/
  - icey 11y ago
    I started reading the sequel this weekend, based on your recommendation. So far it's been excellent. Thank you for the suggestion!
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      You're welcome!
- hellbanner 11y ago
  Is Amazon down for anyone else? Error loading products
  - douche 11y ago
    That link seems to be broken, as well as most of the product links that Amazon surfaces on the error page. Searching for the title seems to work fine.
- bduerst 11y ago
  Sounds a bit like the premise for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where a payroll computer takes up learning humor as a hobby.
  - Kluny 11y ago
    ... and ends up choreographing the the civil war of independence of a prison colony. A great book, one of my favorites.
- bojo 11y ago
  This was the first book that popped into my mind when I saw the article. Great series, worth reading all the way through.
mapleoin 11y ago
Finally! This will dispel all those rumours that Google reads all your email.
- shpx 11y ago
  Why do you care if a computer reads through your email? Its not like Larry Page is looking through your search history. AI seems to just be data expressed in some way, ei me and you are a physical expression of years of gigabit streams of data. This will only become more strongly felt as we get closer to serious AI. Sadly I think its something you either get used to or go live in the woods.
  - jonlucc 11y ago
    The most obvious answer for me is that the computer could tell people to take interest if the email matches some criteria. So it isn't the intrusive one, but it could automate finding people to intrude on.
    - shpx 11y ago
      Do you think that this hasn't been happening? As someone posting on tech site, you should be aware that they scan emails for keywords, probably google and certainly the NSA. Furthermore, training LSTM networks on emails has nothing to do with what you are concerned about.
      - Retra 11y ago
        Whether or not it is currently happening really has no bearing on whether or not it should happen.
  - pluma 11y ago
    Same argument as the NSA: "It's not surveillance until a human looks at the data"
    - marvy 11y ago
dikaiosune 11y ago
While the technology is very cool, this pushes me that much closer to a "dumber" email service. It's always a conflict for me as I love shiny new things, but I'd rather we let AI loose on someone else's email, especially when the AI's revenue stream is advertising (a business predicated on knowing as much as possible about your audience).
- bobmichael 11y ago
  I don't think I understand your reasoning. You're already tolerating an AI processing your email to produce the ads, so assuming that, why does a cool new feature push you closer towards a "dumber" service?
  - dikaiosune 11y ago
    Because I'm lazy and switching would be time consuming. Each new privacy-related "innovation" motivates me a little more. You're right that the practical effect of this new service is negligible on a technical level, but it still reminds me that I should find an alternative I find acceptable.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      So basically, because pretty much every useful data-and-automation-based thing - especially on the social, not individual level - can be considered an erosion of privacy, should we just stop progress? That's the sentiment I feel radiating from yours and others' complaints about privacy here.
      - dikaiosune 11y ago
        Certainly not. I quite enjoy the features I get from having my data run through a lot of systems. However, you don't need to be a Luddite to recognize that sometimes some users of data (like sometimes Google) aren't as responsible or considerate of the privacy implications of their actions as they should be. When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former. I still use a variety of Google products all the time, but when they're training machines to understand the meaning of my emails, I begin to think perhaps that's beyond my comfort zone. I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something. I get that in most cases this isn't ever going to have a practical effect, but I would be a lot more comfortable if our society's data stewards were less blase about that side of things.
sagarjauhari 11y ago
Similar to the quick text feature when not taking a phone call, this could come in handy - especially on phones. But does that mean I'll have to re-enable Inbox to try it. Duh :(
alphydan 11y ago
> Another bizarre feature of our early prototype was its propensity to respond with “I love you” to seemingly anything Is it trained mostly on personal gmail accounts?
- x5n1 11y ago
  I love you! We should go out some time.
  - ewzimm 11y ago
    Would like to see the Maeby Funke addon where "Marry Me!" is always the first response.
    - jethro_tell 11y ago
      Baby Sit me!
- jessriedel 11y ago
  Relevant satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zNsUTWsOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zNsUTWsOc
- mattgmg 11y ago
  Reading that made me very happy for some reason. I find it exceedingly cute that after churning through what was probably millions of gmail users' email responses, this Google machine decided the most likely response to many new emails is simply "I love you." Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to know there's so much love out there in the world for this algorithm to absorb.
deckar01 11y ago
I kept imagining it would generate responses based on MY past emails until the end of the article. Example "When does your flight leave for Paris?", I was imagining it would pull the info from Google Now to reply "Friday at 9am", but I don't think it is built for this type of specific question.
- benplumley 11y ago
  Knowing Google, they'll be working on that by the time they release this.
julianozen 11y ago
Where's the "sorry, I won't be able to make it." in the server dropping email.
msoad 11y ago
It's not available for Google Apps users or am I missing something? It doesn't show any replies to me...
- rgawdzik 11y ago
  "available later this week", they should of released this blog post when it was available.
pjmlp 11y ago
Waiting for the news about social and legal problems that will happen from typing on the wrong answer.
- willhinsa 11y ago
  You can anyways undo the sent message! A great feature of Inbox.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    No you cannot, it is not part of the email protocol. Once it is sent, it is gone. I always have fun with those "Please delete messages" from Outlook sent to my email client.
    - thrownaway2424 11y ago
      Yes, that was a nice strong statement but you are wrong, and the other guy is right. When you send a message from Inbox, you can cancel it, for a few seconds. It doesn't bother actually sending it until the Undo button has disappeared.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        The statement I was replying to never mentioned pressing undo button within a specified interval.
    - BrandonY 11y ago
      Gmail does not literally unsend SMTP messages. To give you time to undo, Gmail delays sending the message for a few seconds. So if you don't select "Undo" within the time limit, your message will be sent. How to use: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en
      - thrownaway2424 11y ago
        Note these instructions are for how to enable this on Gmail, the original. Inbox does this by default.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
> But replying to email on mobile is a real pain, even for short replies. Imo, this has already been solved. I just whisper replies into my watch for both email and SMS. Google's voice recognition is finally good enough for this. I can't think of anything more convenient. I'm not sure if AI-ish replies are something I'm interested in. Throwing complex fuzzy logic at what should be a hardware/interface problem seems shortsighted. I prefer a much higher level of granular control, especially if these messages are work related.
imh 11y ago
I appreciate the privacy standards they used (no humans reading your email to develop this), but am concerned that it's not enough. As I understand with language models, overfitting takes the form of returning a sequence of words seen in the training set. If this is overfitting in any part of the response space, this could happen. Out of a million emails, how many suggested responses are going to substantively resemble another response the original author wouldn't want read by others?
- IgorPartola 11y ago
  But you have a lot more to go off here and the number of replies is limited to maybe a few thousand at most. It can quickly determine if it's a scheduling email, check your calendar, and generate responses like "I am available" and "I'm busy". For others it can be as simple as "I'll check it out and get back to you". Finally, if you are expected to review the automatically composed response or choose from several options it's actually not that bad at all. This actually seems a lot like the iOS feature where if you miss hang up on an incoming call you can send a quick SMS reply back saying things like "I'll call you back" or automatically adding a reminder to call back in an hour.
  - imh 11y ago
    I'm talking about a slightly different problem. I'm not suggesting that you might accidentally click to send a reply you didn't want to share, so you reviewing it is beside the point. I'm suggesting that by mining all our emails, it might make a suggestion to me based on something you didn't want to share. E.g. Someone writes me an email about a rare kink you often talk about. You're the main data point on that kink, so it suggests I respond with something you often say when you talk about this topic, maybe including personal details. It's not a totally precise or realistic example, but with large numbers and complex models, unintended things are bound to happen on occasion. Will those things leak information? As for your comment that the potential replies are limited in number and as structured as you say, I don't get that from the original post, and it doesn't quite fit with my understanding of the model.
    - 11y ago
hokkos 11y ago
Does the responses generated from one user response leaks to another one ? Because this could be a major privacy flaw.
yeukhon 11y ago
Minus all other concerns, for the operation / infrastructure / devops, the auto-replying about server downtime or inquiry about performance, those kinds of stuff is something I am actively thinking about and starting to learn how to implement in my organization.
ambicapter 11y ago
Sounds like the system has no way to take into account context. Each message is encoded into a 'thought' vector, but is it difficult to come up with a 'thought' that changes meaning depending on prior messages? I imagine it is such a concern that leads one to look into Hierarchical Temporal Memory and similar techniques.
OkGoDoIt 11y ago
This looks more powerful than iOS's context sensitive keyboard, but that also looked impressive when demoed. It will be interesting to try this out with real-world emails and see how well it works in practice. This gets really exciting when implemented on a smartwatch. Single tap responses that are actually useful would make smartwatches significantly more powerful. Speech recognition is great but it's not always appropriate for social environments.
tabrischen 11y ago
When you receive a call today, you are already prompted with auto response messages such as 'I'm busy, I'll call you back.' This seems like the natural next step.
- alttab 11y ago
  Imagine the day when it suggests an insult for a co-worker based on his or her perceived inferiority.
supersan 11y ago
I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associate with a very corporate design but here they are wanting to add another silly feature and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it will be super useful and then all the other companies will start to copy it. But the thing is they're inventing new ways that really don't fit your product development roadmaps. I really like that about them.
- davidw 11y ago
  > sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2
  - teraflop 11y ago
    Doing it with a low false positive rate (so that you can enable it for everyone without being annoying) is much harder. Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?
    - duaneb 11y ago
      Pretty sure it looks for the phrase "attach", it doesn't appear to be super sophisticated. Either way it works well.
    - leni536 11y ago
      It sure works for hungarian, as far as I remember it doesn't catch all synonyms of "attach".
    - sdrothrock 11y ago
rcthompson 11y ago
Hey, remember that one time when this feature was Gmail's April Fools Day joke[1]? Kind of funny how it's now a serious and actually useful-looking product. [1] https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/autopilot/ https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/autopilot/
- shostack 11y ago
  Wasn't the "Unsend" feature an April Fools joke as well? Man...I hit that Undo button at least several times/day.
- vram22 11y ago
  Another Google April Fools Day joke, some years ago, was Google Paper, or some such name. IIRC it was funny.
  - rcthompson 11y ago
    Well, they kind of made that one for real too, didn't they? http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/index.html http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/index.html
    - kuschku 11y ago
      Great Scott, that site looks like it’s from 1985! https://www.google.com/cloudprint/gadget.html?user=0 https://www.google.com/cloudprint/gadget.html?user=0
- mikeash 11y ago
  Gmail itself was a sort of a serious April Fools joke. It was launched on April 1st, 2004 and because it offered 1GB of free storage when other providers were offering ~5MB, a lot of people assumed it was a hoax.
Sevzinn 11y ago
Senior research scientist? So, a forgetful research scientist?
davedx 11y ago
Meanwhile, Twitter change their favourites from stars to hearts.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  I regret to inform you that actually it isn't really about the algorithms, it's really about the scale. A lot of these algorithms have been sitting on the shelf for many years because they are "that's neat but you'd need an insane amount of power to do that in practice" algorithms. Google connects these otherwise-useless algorithms with insane amounts of power.
jasonmorton 11y ago
This is almost exactly the singularity-igniting innovation described in the sci fi book "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling.
novalis78 11y ago
Interesting. I used a sequence to sequence methodology about 10 years ago in a chatbot that won in a self-learning competition ... of course never had the data available that google has. A bot like that is a great tool to experiment with NLP and ML ideas. This is really an intriguing area of research. https://thinkingai.wordpress.com/ https://thinkingai.wordpress.com/
rasz_pl 11y ago
What could possibly go wrong? dudette:are we still on for dinner with my mom? dude:sure, cant wait to see mrs.Plinketon again. dudette gets suggested reply message generated from one of dude's earlier emails to his friends: "mrs.Plinketon has great tits!" It is amazing to realize this type of technology can be bootstrapped only once (?)- as soon as you start getting automated replies in the system quality of learning on past data will drop, at some point snake will be eating his own automated reply tail. I imagine this system would benefit greatly from optional additional user voice input, something as simple as 1-3 spoken words fed back into Reply network to help with the reply intent decoding. You get email, NN generates 3 replies it thinks you would like, you have different idea for a reply, click microphone icon and say "no, maybe next week", Reply network rebuilds suggested answers with your input shaping reply vector.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
mattgmg 11y ago
I love you. * This is an automated response
MikeTV 11y ago
There's a quip at the bottom: "This blog post may or may not have actually been written by a neural network." Has there been any progress in AI-driven/assisted creative writing (other than sportscasts)?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Animats 11y ago
Slowly, the personal assistants will get smarter and do more of your job. Then you get laid off.
blixt 11y ago
This kind of stuff is really cool. I imagine the future of Google being the same old search box, but instead of entering a search query, you engage in a conversation with Google so you can delve deeply into a narrow topic and get back tailored responses to your question (as opposed to opening 10 tabs of Stack Overflow links that are maybe related to your question). I worry a bit about the long-term risks of this kind of training (query / reply). While this is obviously very far from being "high resolution" enough to single out very specific information, at some point these kinds of tools (and assistant AIs that can answer questions) will out of necessity be able to converse around very domain specific topics. At this point, how do they know what data is private and what is not? It could be tempting to train these AIs on chat logs or e-mail conversations, but that'd give them knowledge of very private information which they might leak to others. Even if they're limited to data that is accessible anonymously, they'd be extremely good at picking up information that wasn't intended for the public. For example, if you could describe a person called /u/andreasblixt on reddit, and leave it up to the bot to put the pieces together that this person is also on Facebook, Twitter, etc... and that obscure forum from 10 years ago. Food for thought. A final thought on this... When these assistant AIs will inevitably have to know something about you. For example, your preferred schedule, food restrictions, preferred airlines, name, family, friends, phone numbers, where you were last night, who you've talked to, etc. Even if we all get our own namespaced AI assistant (i.e., the trained neural network that contains private information is stored and encrypted for your access only), that assistant's "brain" may very well become a prized target because if you get access to it you can interrogate it for information (you most likely can't just access the information in any meaningful way – you'd literally have to give it queries to make it return semantic output with the information you're trying to access). Anyway, automatic e-mail responses, yay!
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  Essentially integrating Wolfram Alpha and IBM Watson into Google?
denniskane 11y ago
I have a concern that is somewhat related to this issue. I've been wanting to play around with doing NLP in the client using the SpeechRecognition API available in Chrome. It typically gives pretty good results for simple recognition purposes, but there is not yet any way to specify an arbitrary grammar for the backend service to use. This is a big deal when someone wants to be able to recognize a name spelled like "Bobbie" rather than "Bobby". The W3C Web Speech spec currently allows for setting arbitrary grammars, but it isn't implemented. I'm just saying it would be cool if some of you AI geniuses at Google could help me out on that front. You can play around with the dumb little AI app that I've been working on that does a little bit of NLP in the browser. Check out this site with Chrome: https://yc-prototype.appspot.com https://yc-prototype.appspot.com. His name is Bertie. You should see his face on the bottom of the page. The site works like an OS in your browser.
killion 11y ago
I'm not sure I trust that this will work that well. Because I still get other peoples flights added to my calendar automatically if they forward their itinerary to me.
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Are these kinds of projects only available in Mountain View?
barnacs 11y ago
Privacy issues aside, please don't. These kinds of features are outright harmful to our society. Human communication and our social skills in general have already detoriated a lot by replacing face to face conversations with audio only, then text. This is just further taking away the incentive to sneak in something personal, something human into our written communication every now and then. IMO, the very reason someone takes the time to type out these kinds of questions as an email message is to make it more personal. Otherwise, they could just use an rsvp/calendar system or a bug tracker for the particular queries in the article, which already enable you to send such generic replies with 1 or 2 taps at most. Can we stop misusing technology to dumb down our everyday lives and stop transforming our society into a bunch of isolated individuals living on the same planet?
hmate9 11y ago
Maybe shortly we'll just have neural networks talking to each other on behalf of us.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  Everyone has "people" now. Having "people" is no longer for the rich. But they're also not really people.
rdl 11y ago
This would seem to be an area where senders could alter behavior to make things work better with this...maybe being explicit about the question and options.
scottm30 11y ago
I'd love to see this extended in future to include: - using mannerisms I have used with the sender in past emails - scan my calendar schedule and have an idea of my availability and use that in the response The product in its current form sounds great and I'm keen to give it a try.
ksk 11y ago
I guess I've already automatically consented to Google using my emails to train their algorithms. How does filing bugs work in the scenario where the machine learning can't figure something out? Is a copy of someones personal email attached to the bug report?
keshav57 11y ago
> The solution was provided by Sujith Ravi, whose team developed a great machine learning system for mapping natural language responses to semantic intents. This was instrumental in several phases of the project, and was critical to solving the "response diversity problem": by knowing how semantically similar two responses are, we can suggest responses that are different not only in wording, but in their underlying meaning. Does anyone know where I can find out more about this? A paper or something maybe?
zhanwei 11y ago
next step, check your calendar for scheduling conflict and suggest the right response, i.e., "i'll be there"/"i can't make it". further extension, pull out quick answers from other emails, i.e., "what's the sales number this month?" "100M" from another email
WWKong 11y ago
The real potential here is eliminating human interaction. On the sending end machine should auto compose, auto target a mailing list, send it out. On receiving end machine should scan incoming email, compose a response, send it out. That would cover 95% of current email traffic.
jes5199 11y ago
Did they really write this whole article about machine-generated text but not actually include an example of the actual reply the system generated?
- gosub 11y ago
  There are three example responses at the bottom of each picture, above the navigation buttons.
- lwf 11y ago
  They did, in the three blue text areas below each message in the screenshot.
shrikrishna 11y ago
In a parodical reality with mistaken pressings of the "two buttons to reply" feature > Obama: Hey Hillary, what do you think, should we bomb <X>? > Hillary: Sure! Count me in! > Hillary: Hey! Don't consider that last email! Damn auto reply... That aside, as a fellow nerd, neural net FTW!
orchestrate 11y ago
liked it!
sandworm101 11y ago
"...In developing Smart Reply we adhered to the same rigorous user privacy standards we’ve always held -- in other words, no humans reading your email." That the humans at Google may read my email is the least of my privacy concerns. That the robots will pass them along to other robots at places other than google is the real worry. But as no such agency exists, why worry?

562 points by dpf 11y ago

icey 11y ago

I just started reading Avogadro Corp (http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appears-ebook/dp/B006ACIMQQ http://www.amazon.com/Avogadro-Corp-Singularity-Closer-Appea...) this weekend, and this reminds me quite a lot of the emergent AI that figures heavily in the story (ELOPe). A quick synopsis: developers build a system to "improve" responses from emails. The system at some point is given the ability to send emails on its own, and a poorly issued directive. It's been an engaging read so far, and fairly hilarious since the corporation in the book is very obviously based on Google.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
You'll love the ending. I highly recommend you read the sequel as well: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FZVI2M/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007FZVI2M/
- icey 11y ago
  I started reading the sequel this weekend, based on your recommendation. So far it's been excellent. Thank you for the suggestion!
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    You're welcome!
hellbanner 11y ago
Is Amazon down for anyone else? Error loading products
- douche 11y ago
  That link seems to be broken, as well as most of the product links that Amazon surfaces on the error page. Searching for the title seems to work fine.
bduerst 11y ago
Sounds a bit like the premise for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, where a payroll computer takes up learning humor as a hobby.
- Kluny 11y ago
  ... and ends up choreographing the the civil war of independence of a prison colony. A great book, one of my favorites.
bojo 11y ago
This was the first book that popped into my mind when I saw the article. Great series, worth reading all the way through.

mapleoin 11y ago

Finally! This will dispel all those rumours that Google reads all your email.

shpx 11y ago
Why do you care if a computer reads through your email? Its not like Larry Page is looking through your search history. AI seems to just be data expressed in some way, ei me and you are a physical expression of years of gigabit streams of data. This will only become more strongly felt as we get closer to serious AI. Sadly I think its something you either get used to or go live in the woods.
- jonlucc 11y ago
  The most obvious answer for me is that the computer could tell people to take interest if the email matches some criteria. So it isn't the intrusive one, but it could automate finding people to intrude on.
  - shpx 11y ago
    Do you think that this hasn't been happening? As someone posting on tech site, you should be aware that they scan emails for keywords, probably google and certainly the NSA. Furthermore, training LSTM networks on emails has nothing to do with what you are concerned about.
    - Retra 11y ago
      Whether or not it is currently happening really has no bearing on whether or not it should happen.
- pluma 11y ago
  Same argument as the NSA: "It's not surveillance until a human looks at the data"
  - marvy 11y ago

dikaiosune 11y ago

While the technology is very cool, this pushes me that much closer to a "dumber" email service. It's always a conflict for me as I love shiny new things, but I'd rather we let AI loose on someone else's email, especially when the AI's revenue stream is advertising (a business predicated on knowing as much as possible about your audience).

bobmichael 11y ago
I don't think I understand your reasoning. You're already tolerating an AI processing your email to produce the ads, so assuming that, why does a cool new feature push you closer towards a "dumber" service?
- dikaiosune 11y ago
  Because I'm lazy and switching would be time consuming. Each new privacy-related "innovation" motivates me a little more. You're right that the practical effect of this new service is negligible on a technical level, but it still reminds me that I should find an alternative I find acceptable.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    So basically, because pretty much every useful data-and-automation-based thing - especially on the social, not individual level - can be considered an erosion of privacy, should we just stop progress? That's the sentiment I feel radiating from yours and others' complaints about privacy here.
    - dikaiosune 11y ago
      Certainly not. I quite enjoy the features I get from having my data run through a lot of systems. However, you don't need to be a Luddite to recognize that sometimes some users of data (like sometimes Google) aren't as responsible or considerate of the privacy implications of their actions as they should be. When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former. I still use a variety of Google products all the time, but when they're training machines to understand the meaning of my emails, I begin to think perhaps that's beyond my comfort zone. I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something. I get that in most cases this isn't ever going to have a practical effect, but I would be a lot more comfortable if our society's data stewards were less blase about that side of things.

sagarjauhari 11y ago

Similar to the quick text feature when not taking a phone call, this could come in handy - especially on phones. But does that mean I'll have to re-enable Inbox to try it. Duh :(

alphydan 11y ago

> Another bizarre feature of our early prototype was its propensity to respond with “I love you” to seemingly anything Is it trained mostly on personal gmail accounts?

x5n1 11y ago
I love you! We should go out some time.
- ewzimm 11y ago
  Would like to see the Maeby Funke addon where "Marry Me!" is always the first response.
  - jethro_tell 11y ago
    Baby Sit me!
jessriedel 11y ago
Relevant satire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zNsUTWsOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8zNsUTWsOc
mattgmg 11y ago
Reading that made me very happy for some reason. I find it exceedingly cute that after churning through what was probably millions of gmail users' email responses, this Google machine decided the most likely response to many new emails is simply "I love you." Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside to know there's so much love out there in the world for this algorithm to absorb.

deckar01 11y ago

I kept imagining it would generate responses based on MY past emails until the end of the article. Example "When does your flight leave for Paris?", I was imagining it would pull the info from Google Now to reply "Friday at 9am", but I don't think it is built for this type of specific question.

benplumley 11y ago
Knowing Google, they'll be working on that by the time they release this.

julianozen 11y ago

Where's the "sorry, I won't be able to make it." in the server dropping email.

msoad 11y ago

It's not available for Google Apps users or am I missing something? It doesn't show any replies to me...

rgawdzik 11y ago
"available later this week", they should of released this blog post when it was available.

pjmlp 11y ago

Waiting for the news about social and legal problems that will happen from typing on the wrong answer.

willhinsa 11y ago
You can anyways undo the sent message! A great feature of Inbox.
- pjmlp 11y ago
  No you cannot, it is not part of the email protocol. Once it is sent, it is gone. I always have fun with those "Please delete messages" from Outlook sent to my email client.
  - thrownaway2424 11y ago
    Yes, that was a nice strong statement but you are wrong, and the other guy is right. When you send a message from Inbox, you can cancel it, for a few seconds. It doesn't bother actually sending it until the Undo button has disappeared.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      The statement I was replying to never mentioned pressing undo button within a specified interval.
  - BrandonY 11y ago
    Gmail does not literally unsend SMTP messages. To give you time to undo, Gmail delays sending the message for a few seconds. So if you don't select "Undo" within the time limit, your message will be sent. How to use: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en
    - thrownaway2424 11y ago
      Note these instructions are for how to enable this on Gmail, the original. Inbox does this by default.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

> But replying to email on mobile is a real pain, even for short replies. Imo, this has already been solved. I just whisper replies into my watch for both email and SMS. Google's voice recognition is finally good enough for this. I can't think of anything more convenient. I'm not sure if AI-ish replies are something I'm interested in. Throwing complex fuzzy logic at what should be a hardware/interface problem seems shortsighted. I prefer a much higher level of granular control, especially if these messages are work related.

imh 11y ago

I appreciate the privacy standards they used (no humans reading your email to develop this), but am concerned that it's not enough. As I understand with language models, overfitting takes the form of returning a sequence of words seen in the training set. If this is overfitting in any part of the response space, this could happen. Out of a million emails, how many suggested responses are going to substantively resemble another response the original author wouldn't want read by others?

IgorPartola 11y ago
But you have a lot more to go off here and the number of replies is limited to maybe a few thousand at most. It can quickly determine if it's a scheduling email, check your calendar, and generate responses like "I am available" and "I'm busy". For others it can be as simple as "I'll check it out and get back to you". Finally, if you are expected to review the automatically composed response or choose from several options it's actually not that bad at all. This actually seems a lot like the iOS feature where if you miss hang up on an incoming call you can send a quick SMS reply back saying things like "I'll call you back" or automatically adding a reminder to call back in an hour.
- imh 11y ago
  I'm talking about a slightly different problem. I'm not suggesting that you might accidentally click to send a reply you didn't want to share, so you reviewing it is beside the point. I'm suggesting that by mining all our emails, it might make a suggestion to me based on something you didn't want to share. E.g. Someone writes me an email about a rare kink you often talk about. You're the main data point on that kink, so it suggests I respond with something you often say when you talk about this topic, maybe including personal details. It's not a totally precise or realistic example, but with large numbers and complex models, unintended things are bound to happen on occasion. Will those things leak information? As for your comment that the potential replies are limited in number and as structured as you say, I don't get that from the original post, and it doesn't quite fit with my understanding of the model.
  - 11y ago

hokkos 11y ago

Does the responses generated from one user response leaks to another one ? Because this could be a major privacy flaw.

yeukhon 11y ago

Minus all other concerns, for the operation / infrastructure / devops, the auto-replying about server downtime or inquiry about performance, those kinds of stuff is something I am actively thinking about and starting to learn how to implement in my organization.

ambicapter 11y ago

Sounds like the system has no way to take into account context. Each message is encoded into a 'thought' vector, but is it difficult to come up with a 'thought' that changes meaning depending on prior messages? I imagine it is such a concern that leads one to look into Hierarchical Temporal Memory and similar techniques.

OkGoDoIt 11y ago

This looks more powerful than iOS's context sensitive keyboard, but that also looked impressive when demoed. It will be interesting to try this out with real-world emails and see how well it works in practice. This gets really exciting when implemented on a smartwatch. Single tap responses that are actually useful would make smartwatches significantly more powerful. Speech recognition is great but it's not always appropriate for social environments.

tabrischen 11y ago

When you receive a call today, you are already prompted with auto response messages such as 'I'm busy, I'll call you back.' This seems like the natural next step.

alttab 11y ago
Imagine the day when it suggests an insult for a co-worker based on his or her perceived inferiority.

supersan 11y ago

I'm often amazed how Google still gives it staff this unique hacker-like approach to their million dollar projects. For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". It's something I wouldn't generally associate with a very corporate design but here they are wanting to add another silly feature and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it will be super useful and then all the other companies will start to copy it. But the thing is they're inventing new ways that really don't fit your product development roadmaps. I really like that about them.

davidw 11y ago
> sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot". That one's not that hard. http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2 http://marc.info/?l=mutt-dev&m=95685122323646&w=2
- teraflop 11y ago
  Doing it with a low false positive rate (so that you can enable it for everyone without being annoying) is much harder. Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?
  - duaneb 11y ago
    Pretty sure it looks for the phrase "attach", it doesn't appear to be super sophisticated. Either way it works well.
  - leni536 11y ago
    It sure works for hungarian, as far as I remember it doesn't catch all synonyms of "attach".
  - sdrothrock 11y ago

rcthompson 11y ago

Hey, remember that one time when this feature was Gmail's April Fools Day joke[1]? Kind of funny how it's now a serious and actually useful-looking product. [1] https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/autopilot/ https://www.gmail.com/mail/help/autopilot/

shostack 11y ago
Wasn't the "Unsend" feature an April Fools joke as well? Man...I hit that Undo button at least several times/day.
vram22 11y ago
Another Google April Fools Day joke, some years ago, was Google Paper, or some such name. IIRC it was funny.
- rcthompson 11y ago
  Well, they kind of made that one for real too, didn't they? http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/index.html http://www.google.com/cloudprint/learn/index.html
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Great Scott, that site looks like it’s from 1985! https://www.google.com/cloudprint/gadget.html?user=0 https://www.google.com/cloudprint/gadget.html?user=0
mikeash 11y ago
Gmail itself was a sort of a serious April Fools joke. It was launched on April 1st, 2004 and because it offered 1GB of free storage when other providers were offering ~5MB, a lot of people assumed it was a hoax.

Sevzinn 11y ago

Senior research scientist? So, a forgetful research scientist?

davedx 11y ago

Meanwhile, Twitter change their favourites from stars to hearts.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

thrownaway2424 11y ago
I regret to inform you that actually it isn't really about the algorithms, it's really about the scale. A lot of these algorithms have been sitting on the shelf for many years because they are "that's neat but you'd need an insane amount of power to do that in practice" algorithms. Google connects these otherwise-useless algorithms with insane amounts of power.

jasonmorton 11y ago

This is almost exactly the singularity-igniting innovation described in the sci fi book "Avogadro Corp" by William Hertling.

novalis78 11y ago

Interesting. I used a sequence to sequence methodology about 10 years ago in a chatbot that won in a self-learning competition ... of course never had the data available that google has. A bot like that is a great tool to experiment with NLP and ML ideas. This is really an intriguing area of research. https://thinkingai.wordpress.com/ https://thinkingai.wordpress.com/

rasz_pl 11y ago

What could possibly go wrong? dudette:are we still on for dinner with my mom? dude:sure, cant wait to see mrs.Plinketon again. dudette gets suggested reply message generated from one of dude's earlier emails to his friends: "mrs.Plinketon has great tits!" It is amazing to realize this type of technology can be bootstrapped only once (?)- as soon as you start getting automated replies in the system quality of learning on past data will drop, at some point snake will be eating his own automated reply tail. I imagine this system would benefit greatly from optional additional user voice input, something as simple as 1-3 spoken words fed back into Reply network to help with the reply intent decoding. You get email, NN generates 3 replies it thinks you would like, you have different idea for a reply, click microphone icon and say "no, maybe next week", Reply network rebuilds suggested answers with your input shaping reply vector.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

mattgmg 11y ago

I love you. * This is an automated response

MikeTV 11y ago

There's a quip at the bottom: "This blog post may or may not have actually been written by a neural network." Has there been any progress in AI-driven/assisted creative writing (other than sportscasts)?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Animats 11y ago

Slowly, the personal assistants will get smarter and do more of your job. Then you get laid off.

blixt 11y ago

This kind of stuff is really cool. I imagine the future of Google being the same old search box, but instead of entering a search query, you engage in a conversation with Google so you can delve deeply into a narrow topic and get back tailored responses to your question (as opposed to opening 10 tabs of Stack Overflow links that are maybe related to your question). I worry a bit about the long-term risks of this kind of training (query / reply). While this is obviously very far from being "high resolution" enough to single out very specific information, at some point these kinds of tools (and assistant AIs that can answer questions) will out of necessity be able to converse around very domain specific topics. At this point, how do they know what data is private and what is not? It could be tempting to train these AIs on chat logs or e-mail conversations, but that'd give them knowledge of very private information which they might leak to others. Even if they're limited to data that is accessible anonymously, they'd be extremely good at picking up information that wasn't intended for the public. For example, if you could describe a person called /u/andreasblixt on reddit, and leave it up to the bot to put the pieces together that this person is also on Facebook, Twitter, etc... and that obscure forum from 10 years ago. Food for thought. A final thought on this... When these assistant AIs will inevitably have to know something about you. For example, your preferred schedule, food restrictions, preferred airlines, name, family, friends, phone numbers, where you were last night, who you've talked to, etc. Even if we all get our own namespaced AI assistant (i.e., the trained neural network that contains private information is stored and encrypted for your access only), that assistant's "brain" may very well become a prized target because if you get access to it you can interrogate it for information (you most likely can't just access the information in any meaningful way – you'd literally have to give it queries to make it return semantic output with the information you're trying to access). Anyway, automatic e-mail responses, yay!

Natanael_L 11y ago
Essentially integrating Wolfram Alpha and IBM Watson into Google?

denniskane 11y ago

I have a concern that is somewhat related to this issue. I've been wanting to play around with doing NLP in the client using the SpeechRecognition API available in Chrome. It typically gives pretty good results for simple recognition purposes, but there is not yet any way to specify an arbitrary grammar for the backend service to use. This is a big deal when someone wants to be able to recognize a name spelled like "Bobbie" rather than "Bobby". The W3C Web Speech spec currently allows for setting arbitrary grammars, but it isn't implemented. I'm just saying it would be cool if some of you AI geniuses at Google could help me out on that front. You can play around with the dumb little AI app that I've been working on that does a little bit of NLP in the browser. Check out this site with Chrome: https://yc-prototype.appspot.com https://yc-prototype.appspot.com. His name is Bertie. You should see his face on the bottom of the page. The site works like an OS in your browser.

killion 11y ago

I'm not sure I trust that this will work that well. Because I still get other peoples flights added to my calendar automatically if they forward their itinerary to me.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

Are these kinds of projects only available in Mountain View?

barnacs 11y ago

Privacy issues aside, please don't. These kinds of features are outright harmful to our society. Human communication and our social skills in general have already detoriated a lot by replacing face to face conversations with audio only, then text. This is just further taking away the incentive to sneak in something personal, something human into our written communication every now and then. IMO, the very reason someone takes the time to type out these kinds of questions as an email message is to make it more personal. Otherwise, they could just use an rsvp/calendar system or a bug tracker for the particular queries in the article, which already enable you to send such generic replies with 1 or 2 taps at most. Can we stop misusing technology to dumb down our everyday lives and stop transforming our society into a bunch of isolated individuals living on the same planet?

hmate9 11y ago

Maybe shortly we'll just have neural networks talking to each other on behalf of us.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
Everyone has "people" now. Having "people" is no longer for the rich. But they're also not really people.

rdl 11y ago

This would seem to be an area where senders could alter behavior to make things work better with this...maybe being explicit about the question and options.

scottm30 11y ago

I'd love to see this extended in future to include: - using mannerisms I have used with the sender in past emails - scan my calendar schedule and have an idea of my availability and use that in the response The product in its current form sounds great and I'm keen to give it a try.

ksk 11y ago

I guess I've already automatically consented to Google using my emails to train their algorithms. How does filing bugs work in the scenario where the machine learning can't figure something out? Is a copy of someones personal email attached to the bug report?

keshav57 11y ago

> The solution was provided by Sujith Ravi, whose team developed a great machine learning system for mapping natural language responses to semantic intents. This was instrumental in several phases of the project, and was critical to solving the "response diversity problem": by knowing how semantically similar two responses are, we can suggest responses that are different not only in wording, but in their underlying meaning. Does anyone know where I can find out more about this? A paper or something maybe?

zhanwei 11y ago

next step, check your calendar for scheduling conflict and suggest the right response, i.e., "i'll be there"/"i can't make it". further extension, pull out quick answers from other emails, i.e., "what's the sales number this month?" "100M" from another email

WWKong 11y ago

The real potential here is eliminating human interaction. On the sending end machine should auto compose, auto target a mailing list, send it out. On receiving end machine should scan incoming email, compose a response, send it out. That would cover 95% of current email traffic.

jes5199 11y ago

Did they really write this whole article about machine-generated text but not actually include an example of the actual reply the system generated?

gosub 11y ago
There are three example responses at the bottom of each picture, above the navigation buttons.
lwf 11y ago
They did, in the three blue text areas below each message in the screenshot.

shrikrishna 11y ago

In a parodical reality with mistaken pressings of the "two buttons to reply" feature > Obama: Hey Hillary, what do you think, should we bomb <X>? > Hillary: Sure! Count me in! > Hillary: Hey! Don't consider that last email! Damn auto reply... That aside, as a fellow nerd, neural net FTW!

orchestrate 11y ago

liked it!

sandworm101 11y ago

"...In developing Smart Reply we adhered to the same rigorous user privacy standards we’ve always held -- in other words, no humans reading your email." That the humans at Google may read my email is the least of my privacy concerns. That the robots will pass them along to other robots at places other than google is the real worry. But as no such agency exists, why worry?