​Gmail Wants To Become Your Super Smart Email Scribe

If you thought writing a letter was antiquated, wait until you hear about the newest trend in email services: intelligent replies to emails generated by artificial intelligence networks. Google is leading this trend with its Smart Reply feature that learns how you reply to emails through artificial intelligence tools. While you might be thinking that this sounds a lot like automatic replies, once you understand the complexity of Google’s system, you might think twice before deciding it’s a good idea.

The Smart Reply technology that is already available for use in Gmail, Google’s mail service, uses deep learning techniques to learn the patterns of how you tend to reply to email messages. The platform analyzes the content of an email message and suggests a few brief, 3-6 word responses, that make it possible for you to answer your email on-the-go. So if your colleague writes you a message asking, “What are your plans for vacation?”, Smart Reply will automatically reply for you with “I haven’t made plans yet” or “I just booked my flight”, according to the information that it knows about you. In addition, Gmail is employing artificial intelligence technology to filter out advanced spam emails that seem like regular emails composed by impersonators.

Of course, there are a number of obvious downsides to the 21st century luxury of your own email scribe. The first is that in order for Gmail to understand the most appropriate reply, it has to read the content of all of your emails, and not just the email in question. Like in the above example, in order to know if you have made your vacation plans or not, Gmail will scour through other emails in your inbox to ascertain whether you have made plane or hotel reservations for your upcoming vacation and will answer your colleague accordingly. Smart Reply doesn’t take things like social nuisances into account, and therefore could potentially give away information about you in a reply that you wouldn’t necessarily approve of. While the system is able to identify jokes and emit a proper response, other social cues are still foreign to it.

Currently, Smart Reply is able to generate about 20,000 discrete short replies to emails. There is an option to edit the replies, but the goal is to be able to click “automatic reply” and not have to worry about the fact that Gmail might give away information about you, or reply something socially awkward like “I love you,” which happens to be a real glitch in the system. Until Google is able to work out all of the kinks, it might be better to continue replying to your own emails, especially if you are concerned with privacy and don’t want Google to do all your talking for you.