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Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
- aantix 8y agoI feel like I could type these robotic responses as fast if not faster than it takes Google to "help" me.
- nascar_is_bad 8y agoit's not for you. it's for grandma
- diggan 8y agoI don't think so, I think this is for professional users. Grandma is not gonna realize that the slightly greyed out text is not already there, and also that tab actually writes out the text for her.
- jakear 8y agoIn my experience anything keyboard related is not a good solution for “grandma”. What I’ve seen work best is voice to text. My dad composes all of his messages with voice, as the alternative is first finding his reading glasses, then pecking out keys with only his index fingers at a rate of about half a key a second. Sure he could abbreviate and autocomplete his way through a sentence... but then I’m not talking to my dad anymore; instead I’m talking to some k’th mean of human interaction.
- quickthrower2 8y agoWatch out. That's a stereotype, and it might be offensive.
- scott_s 8y agoI go out of my way to avoid banal phrases in my emails.
- legohead 8y agoNo kidding.. their demo gifs look like an April Fools joke to me.
- rahilb 8y agoBanal pleasantries cost nothing (less than nothing with this new feature), and at worst are ignored and at best make the receiver feel better about you and the important text that follows.
- aserafini 8y agoThey can have a cost if they dilute the core intent or message of the email: the reader has a higher cognitive overhead before understanding how to reply or what action to take. I spend a lot effort stripping out fluff and filler fron my mails, as a courtesy to the recipient!
- chimprich 8y agoI was thinking this might actually be a useful feature for me - if Google suggests an autocompleted phrase I was about to use, I could think of a better, more interesting alternative.
- ijafri 8y agoOnly if your recipient is a bot too. Having said that could work very well for ‘business emails, where essentially we’re writing in the same tone than personal email’ PS: I’m loving the idea and let’s hope it can get tailored to ones individual needs
- falcor84 8y agoI quite like this incremental approach towards AI, of providing a suggesting assistant rather than trying to solve the full problem at once.
- SilasX 8y agoThis is just extended auto-complete with the unintended reminder of how predictable/cliche your writing is.
- aerovistae 8y agoGood lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own. Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story The Great Automatic Grammatizator ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction. Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.
- wetback 8y agoI despise the homogenization of thought that these tools lead to. My words are my own, even my typos.
- ovao 8y agoI don't think there's any basis for the argument that autocomplete tools lead to "homogenization of thought", and therefore no reason to "despise" them.
- netheril96 8y agoI don't think typos communicate any information of value.
- skybrian 8y agoOh no, more autocomplete! I don't see it as much scarier than tab-completion while programming or on a phone. As long as you're watching over it and fixing mistakes, it's just a convenience.
- aerovistae 8y agoIf it wrote the entire email for you, and you watched it to see there were no mistakes, I suppose that would just be a convenience too. But at some point you cross a line and your voice is lost. That line draws closer, inch by inch.
- skybrian 8y agoAt that point it shades into ghostwriting, which can be done well or badly. If done well, it should be imitating how you'd write it yourself.
- meeton 8y agoThis is awful. We need _less_ mediation and commodification of our personal interactions, not more. What is the use of this? At best this is a solution searching for a problem, at worst it's an attempt to standardize our communication in a way which makes semantic meaning easier to analyse.
- titanix2 8y agoAgree. While predictive keyboard is really helpful on mobile (the Windows Phone one was amazing) because it's inconvenient to type on a small on-screen keyboard, and some daily-life interactions are repetitive, on the email side it is the reverse that's apply: most (personal) mails are a priori different in content and a physical keyboard does not justify external helping system. Especially that being a Goole product, you can be sure they will reused everything you type to know more about you.
- hangonhn 8y agoAgreed. Rather than something customers asked for, this feels like something driven by the culture at Google: "AI all the things" and "build new things" to get promoted.
- z0r 8y agoWhen the majority of written communications are composed from a few selected branches, the potential storage and transmission savings are huge!
- euyyn 8y agoYou should receive the amount of corporate email I do. I don't want my email responses at work to be rich personal interactions. I want them to take me the least amount of time while still being useful.
- rdiddly 8y agoAha, by training a machine learning algorithm on everybody else's emails, you can now write what everybody else wrote. It's a new generation of Clippy! I'VE GOT THIS, THANKS!
- imglorp 8y agoIn their defense, I do like the quick answer buttons sometimes. There's lots of cases where "Okay, thanks!" or "Got it, will do" is all I need and if it offers that, great, one click and done.
- mrguyorama 8y agoThe "smart" autofilling of details like address and subject matter are interesting and possibly useful, but I am disgusted by the idea of letting google talk for me.
- tbabb 8y agoIs this some kind of belated April Fool's joke?
- smnrchrds 8y agoI don't think a native English speaker would benefit much from this feature. But as someone for whom English is a second language, I am sure that I would have appreciated this when I was less fluent in English. I am now trying to learn French, and I find myself searching to the most trivial sentences in linguee.fr. Learning grammar and vocabulary is one thing; knowing the idiomatic way to express one's message is an entirely different beast. Things that might seem obvious to a native speaker, e.g. the difference between "I'm fine" and "I'm good," are completely unapproachable for a non-native speaker for the first few years of using the language. Now that I am fluent in English, I would find this feature annoying. But I wish I had access to something like this 10 years ago.
- _bxg1 8y agoInteresting perspective, but a) I think it mainly draws its word choice from your own past messages anyway, and b) wouldn't an integrated translate button be more useful to this purpose?
- insensible 8y agoYes. On a smaller scale, iOS predictive text is helping me learn a new language. Unexpected suggestions become new things to learn about.
- kazinator 8y agoHere is something funny. Google's Japanese Input on Android does English dictionary lookup when you're in romaji mode. And, here is the kicker: you have to use exact spelling, or no dice.
- mikekchar 8y agoThe exact spelling for Japanese is a lot more reasonable, though. In English there are lots of spellings for the same pronunciation. In Japanese there is only one spelling for each pronunciation. If you get it wrong, then you are writing a different word and there is very little you can do in the general case. Of course the problem with romaji is our habit of spelling things wrong :-) To highlight the irony, "romaji" in Japanese is ローマ字 (literally roman (Roma) characters (Ji)). The ロ is "ro", the マ is "ma" and the 字 is "ji". But there is one character left! ー extends the "o" sound for the "ro" for one extra "beat" (Japanese is a rhythmical language). I don't even know the correct transliteration for this other than "rōmaji". For Wāpuro rōmaji I think I would enter "roumaji", but I think this is not actually correct romanisation. Even to this day I mispronounce that word because of stupid romaji :-)
- geophile 8y agoClippy 2.0.
- komali2 8y agoWhat's the point of humans
- calloc2 8y agoHumans may click on ads, though I hear that is automated, too.
- komali2 8y agoFrom "Echopraxia" >"You think this matters"... [Valerie the transhuman] >"You think so, too," Moore [baseline human] began. "Or-" >"-you wouldn't have reacted," he and Valerie finished in sync. >He tried again: "Were they under formal con...," they chorused. He trailed off, an acknowledgement of futility. The [transhuman] even matched his ellipsis without missing a beat.
- scrollaway 8y agoSo why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this? How's it different from opening up your android phone and using google's spellcheck, with algorithms that predict your next word when you're typing? Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable. PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fastmail? (https://www.fastmail.com https://www.fastmail.com)
- peatmoss 8y agoI'm a paying Fastmail user. I switched over after they (EDIT: Gmail) started announcing compatibility-breaking features. Processing my emails to suggest content is one of a litany of reasons that I'm glad to have switched my email to Fastmail. In this particular case, I think people are (probably rightly) concerned about how the machine learning models here are used to suggest content. I would guess that most of the people who are unconcerned with the Android keyboard's privacy model either haven't thought too much about it, or have come to accept it in small increments.
- dmazin 8y agoTwo big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-models-contain-bias.html https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
- peatmoss 8y agoTo add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new. That said, many people habituated to email reading for ads back when Google's brand image was riding higher.
- baxtr 8y agoI don’t understand the sentiment of the comments here (I’m no google fan!). Isn’t that just the natural evolution of word prediction like on a smartphone?
- dmazin 8y agoYes. But let's extend that evolution -- if an AI can pretty much write a solid email, don't we basically become like a safety driver in a self-driving car? Not alluring.
- ovao 8y agoIt's an interesting analogy, since this tool could potentially keep you safe from making costly errors. And, as an email-composing safety driver, you can always take the wheel when you need (or want) to.
- dmazin 8y agoI think one problem is convenience. It's convenient to use this feature, so we find ourselves speaking spontaneously less and less -- and generating less new language.
- rocqua 8y agoLet the AI handle the form, let the human handle the content. If this leads to better or more efficient communication, all the better. In the car analogy, as long as people get where they want to be, what is the issue?
- dmazin 8y agoBut here we're letting AI handle the content. The issue is agency -- like the God of the margins, our agency being relegated to margins at the very least raises some questions for me!
- euyyn 8y agoA Natural Intelligence in the form of a human assistant can write a solid email for an executive that doesn't have time, based on what the executive tells them to write. This is an assistant for everyone, not just the super rich.
- _bxg1 8y agoSmart reply/compose might be the most dystopian thing I've seen come out of Google, which is saying something. Beyond the obvious reduction in conversational authenticity, it threatens to homogenize our voices themselves. I would imagine that after you've been saying "close enough" for a while, the smart replies start to warp the way you phrase things mentally, instead of the other way around.
- _bxg1 8y agoThis comment already seems quaint after having seen the Duplex demo.
- parliament32 8y agoWhy do I want this? At this point we might as well do away with the pre-structured responses and just send single a single emoji as a response. It'd get the same message across.
- chatmasta 8y agoI wonder where the training data comes from? Is it from my account only, my organization account, or...? If I type “Sure, the password is” will it auto suggest some passwords from other people’s previously sent emails?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoIf you use Gmail (or message people on Gmail), your messages have been part of Google's bulk training data since Inbox rolled out with Smart Replies in 2014.
- 40acres 8y agoWhat's the difference between this and auto complete? I think there is a bit of overreacting here.
- ilaksh 8y agoLol. This is exactly like the plot of the book Avogadro Corp. where a Google-like company creates an email-composing system which then leads directly to the singularity as the program pursues it's own agenda.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dmazin 8y agoThis is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: (http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-side-autocorrect/ http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s...) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
- Bukhmanizer 8y agoHoly crap, everybody burn you're dictionaries.
- dmazin 8y agoThe interesting thing is that autocorrect tries to fix many alternate spellings actually included by dictionaries (e.g. "judgement").
- ljm 8y agoI find that even when I set my country to UK and my language settings say 'British English', I'm still getting various autocorrections to US English to the point where I'm maintaining a list of dictionary overrides for words that us Brits spell differently (or have a distinction for), and there are plenty of words that it claims don't exist when a cursory dictionary search elsewhere proves otherwise. It's mostly manageable on a laptop because it's easy to go back and edit text and make your computer behave. On a phone it's ducking^Wducking^Wfucking infuriating because you can automatically get the same correction a good two or three times before you can get the word you want, and you are very actively fighting a tool that is trying too hard to help, to the point it will deliberately misinterpret your keypress if it thinks it has a better idea of what you wanted to type.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- vatueil 8y ago
- ryanpcmcquen 8y agoYet another reason to avoid Gmail.
- Digit-Al 8y agoThose of you complaining about this have obviously never had to deal with the unintelligible gibberish that can sometimes be spewed out by desperate customer support staff on tight deadlines. If this can even begin to help them write sentences that are readable and understandable then I'm all for it.
- sunseb 8y agoI love tech, but it's kind of scary, I think we are heading towards a dystopian future.
- sampleinajar 8y agoThis is very neat technologically. I can't imagine it is easy to do predictive text and have it be meaningful. I suspect that that will be the case here. It will be useful for a narrow subset, mostly rote business things. Otherwise, it will just be an annoyance.
- CryoLogic 8y agoThese types of tools worry me, because I put a lot of value in organic spontaneous conversation. Does anyone remember the old days of Google search maybe 10-15 years ago? You would put in a search query, and often you would find something interesting in a serendipitous manner. These days the machine tries to figure out what you like, and what makes them the most money / is most popular and keeps feeding you that and nothing else. You get trapped in a filter bubble, and nothing ever seems to change in your searches. The same sites, the same quality of content (often low), the same authors. What ever happened to running into the blog of someone who is totally unknown, but put a lot of effort into researching and creating an amazing and informational blog post? Quality well above average, maybe it was their only post. One topic they spent years researching and distilling for the world to see. This is what you will lose in your conversations, just like it has been lost in search.
- amelius 8y agoI want this for code, not email ...
- brlewis 8y agoI'm actually not opposed to this feature in gmail. For code, it already exists, and it's terrible. "Hey, don't you want to catch this error?" Then people catch an error without actually doing anything about the error condition, causing another error to occur later, harder to diagnose. In code, this sort of thing makes it easy to write programs that are skimmed, not read, with lots of tiny cracks for bugs to hide in.
- fitzroy 8y ago"I apologize for such an algorithmically-generated letter letter - I didn't have time to write a non-algorithmically-generated one." ― Mark Twain's Gmail
- joelrunyon 8y agoSide note: How is this blog design by Google considered "good"? Between the dropdown from the top when you scroll and the stickied footer, about a 1/3 of the page is easily readable (shoved into about 500px). I'm not a designer. But this stuff is bad. How is this greenlit at Google?
- leepowers 8y agoYou're right the related articles stickied at the bottom is super-distracting, it draws the eye, and has to be dealt with before you can continue reading. It's an interruption plain an simple - not as bad as a layered modal - but it still introduces an element of work to the reading experience. The really frustrating thing is it's for related articles and it's shown first thing on the page. How about giving me a god damn minute to read the article I clicked on before prompting me to read something else. Related articles are fine. But how about putting them at the bottom of the page? I guess this is an interface a team of geniuses creates when they optimize for engagement instead of content. This is definitely an anti-pattern.
- nogridbag 8y agoScreenshot for reference: https://imgur.com/a/NMEOBgb https://imgur.com/a/NMEOBgb
- njarboe 8y agoI could write emails faster if, when composing an email, the "New Message" box did not cover up the email that I am reading and wanting to respond to. There used to be a function to tear off the "New Message" box, but I guess that was too confusing for people? Now I have to open another browser window if I want to look at an email and compose one at the same time. I'd love to know if there is a good work around or trick to have the compose window open up in a separate window.
- mycorrhizal 8y agoSince many commenters seem to be concerned about the possibility of this homogenizing written communication. What if this system implemented something similar to an epsilon-greedy strategy where say 5% of the time it actually recommended a phrase outside of ordinary writing patterns, but was still grammatically correct and semantically the same? I think if something like that was implemented this could be a cool way to introduce people to new and different writing patterns.
- tysonzni 8y agoIn the new equilibrium of people sending lots of automated emails, how would the receiver of an email distinguish between a canned response and a real response? I suspect the incentive to properly signal your email as real can reduce adoption of "Smart Compose" for non-trivial communication. So that leaves us with use cases like scheduling meetings, quick updates or alerts - most of which are already automated in some extent through notification and logging.
- ColinWright 8y agoDoes this kill EasyMail (YC W18) ?? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650
- raimue 8y ago"It looks like you're writing an email! Would you like help?"
- antonkm 8y ago> Over the next few weeks, Smart Compose will appear in the new Gmail for consumers, and will be made available for G Suite customers in the workplace in the coming months. Weird to roll out to free consumers first. What's the reasoning behind this?
- dragonwriter 8y agoAlmost everything rolls out to free consumers first. The consumer version is like a regular stable release channel, G Suite is like an enhanced product built on top of the latest LTS.
- antonkm 8y agoThanks for the clarification!
- prlambert 8y agoI'm the PM for this and the author of the article. Happy to answer any questions, with the exception that I can't comment on future roadmap.
- mbanerjeepalmer 8y agoHi, thanks for offering to answer questions. Did you consider the language homogenisation question and if so, how did you answer it?
- prlambert 8y agoIt's a great question and one of my early concerns as well. For most people email is a utility. The diversity of language in the middle chunk of the distribution isn't very high today and the biggest complaint most people have about email is how much time it takes. Most of our users aren't writing poetry, they are doing every day business transactions and we can help them be much more productive. Think how many times you've written "hope to hear from you soon", or some equivalent. For the tails of the distribution Smart Compose is not helpful. We address this primarily with a triggering model, we aim to only show suggestions when we're quite confident that you're in the 'just getting things done' mode. And if you're the type of person who always has a lot of personality in your emails, the feature probably isn't a great fit for you. Today it's opt-in, and there will always be a setting even if we turn it on by default.
- mbanerjeepalmer 8y agoOkay interesting. Did you get stats on how diverse the majority of users' language is? I think there's also a second aspect. If I understand correctly, you're referring to the homogenisation of a single user's language (where 'Hope to hear from you soon' loses variation). I think the second aspect is homogenisation of language across many people. Did you look at tailoring the suggestions? In England there must be 30 ways to say goodbye, and this slang arguably is part of regional identity (although I don't know how much made it across to email).
- gesman 8y agoI think Google creating reincarnation of MSFT's clippy - solution looking for problem. These "intelligent" hints of what someone think I likely want to express - quickly becoming a distracting nuisance. Hopefully it'll be optional feature.
- danra 8y agoI was happy to open the comments and see everyone writing approximately what I was thinking. Almost made me feel there would be no point writing something similar myself.
- zitterbewegung 8y agoIs this not going to be a part of Inbox?
- vazamb 8y agoAn so it begins... To anyone who has read Daemon by Daniel Suarez this sounds very creepy.
- _bxg1 8y agoOh god this is even worse https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-human-is-scary-as-1825861987 https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-hum...
- venantius 8y agoOkay, I guess I've got the contrarian take this time around. As a CEO/founder, I spend an astonishing amount of time writing emails that are mostly the same. Things like the following: Dear [name], [pleasantry]. I'm writing to check in on [$$non-automatable follow-up action$$]. [Have you been able to take care of this yet? Let me know if I can be of assistance.] [best regards / thanks] [signature] ... For me, things like Gmail's one/two-sentence responses on mobile are _honestly_ a godsend. Things like Smart Compose are similarly incredibly valuable. I'm not trying to be the world's best orator, I'm just trying to bang off the dozens of emails I need to get taken care of each day as quickly as possible.
- et-al 8y agoSeems like you want a mail merge feature, which does exist for emails.
- Paul-ish 8y agoMaybe this will cause us to think less about we write, or maybe it will allow us to quickly write the things that don't require much thought so we can think more about the things that are important.
- martinpw 8y agoSo far I have found it helpful for the latter. It has not got in the way when I'm trying to communicate something that requires nuance or careful expression, but it has kicked in with suggestions when it sees I am heading towards some banal pleasantry that is expected at certain points in many emails - the sort of thing I don't want to have to think too much about. It also seems to pick things that I would say - not sure if this is learned from my own mail, but if so then it is actually reinforcing my individuality in some way.
- pascalxus 8y agoWasn't this being done by a YC combinator funded company, doing it as a gmail plugin, within the last few years? did they get bought out? or are they now competing against google?
- nathancahill 8y agoI wrote a tool that helps you do this anywhere by using Google's autocomplete API: https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete It also supports DuckDuckGo, so for the privacy conscious it should work fine. Unlike the complaint that Google's product shrinks the lexicon, Anycomplete actually expands your lexicon by allowing you to type words/phrases you have an idea of but don't know how to spell.
- meeton 8y agoPeople are saying this is 'basically the same as autocorrect or predictive text'. It's not. Autocorrect doesn't make any creative decisions for you, whereas this does. That is to say: we think at the level of words, not letter-by-letter. When I make a typo, autocorrect corrects what my hands do to match what my brain is thinking. My brain still has primacy. This thing sits at the level of words and even sentences: if it's autocorrect, it's working to correct what my brain is thinking. Which is creepy and sad. It's a little bit more like predictive text I admit. But because predictive text only suggests one word at a time, there's little semantic meaning to a suggestion and it's rare that I have my thoughts distracted or changed because of it. It's still largely a convenience tool. Suggesting a full sentence is shaping the direction of your thought, which is very different. I'm still horrified that Google has put this out.
- supermdguy 8y agoThis reminds me of waitbutwhy's article on neuralink[0]. Language is an inefficient means of communication. It require niceties and good grammar just to get a simple point across, especially with unfamiliar people. The question is, do we really want to optimize communication? It feels disingenuous to optimize only your end of the conversation, but it could also be really helpful. Hopefully we find a more openly efficient means of communication soon. [0]: https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html
- pvdebbe 8y agoThe title reminds me how Google effectively crippled fast writing of emails a couple of years back, when they fouled up the Compose textbox with fancy JS/HTML hackery. Can't write & paste an email to the Compose box, can't invoke an "edit-text-in-external-editor" browser function on it. There's smart in simplicity.
- Zolomon 8y agoCould anyone direct me to research material of how to implement a system like this for a single language, or a collection of documents?
- hknd 8y agoFeels like auto-complete from any IDE - love it.
- magwa101 8y agoNow where did they get all that training data...