Touch keyboards are (mostly) reliant on the user's history, so they offer a ready made "it's your own damn habits" defense that's less accessible for Google. A

Touch keyboards are (mostly) reliant on the user's history, so they offer a ready made "it's your own damn habits" defense that's less accessible for Google. A larger issue is that touch keyboards predict using single words and pretty quickly spiral into Markov chain incoherence if you let them draft whole messages. Smart Compose tries to offer syntactic and even semantic understanding. If I type "The investor is here, do you want to meet", my phone keyboard is working off 'meet', and will probably suggest 'up'. Smart Compose is working off 'investor' also, and apparently arrived at 'him'. (It's not clear to me from the article if this was actually tracked to specific biases, or if the predictions just adopted the default masculine.) But most of all, I'm guessing Google's core motivation is explained by the offhand comment that Smart Reply uses the same logic. A gendered pronoun suggestion probably isn't going to spark a scandal, but a feature that encourages you to send Google-drafted text unedited might be subject to a lot more scrutiny.