Would You Let Google Answer Your Emails?

If you’re very busy or receive a tonne of email every day, you may have fantasised about having an assistant who could help you work through all of that email and help you deal with it.

If so, Google has rolled out a new feature that may be just what you’re looking for.

Much the way your smartphone has the ability to suggest the next word you might want to type in a text message, Google has rolled out a new feature in its Inbox app that suggests three (very short) responses to an email so that you can respond with a single tap.

The app uses Deep Learning to analyse the contents of an email message and then suggest several responses it thinks would be appropriate.

For example, if someone sends you a joke, Smart Reply can tell, and offers up the response, “Ha. Very funny.”

Of course, you choose which of the three responses is most appropriate to use (if any) and you can edit and add additional text to the responses to personalise them. 

It’s a clever way to speed up rapid responses to some emails, especially on smartphones and tablets where typing can be a pain.

Smart Reply is reading your emails.

What’s advanced about this is that Smart Reply isn’t just offering up canned responses, but tailoring its suggestions based on the content of your email.  Smart Reply is, in effect, reading your emails and generating a response for you.

Google has been reading your emails for years, at first to filter out spam and later to customise the advertisements you see inside Gmail. But now the engineers have taken it one step further, allowing the app to read and respond.

For now the responses are short and action oriented (the types of responses users are likely to want to send from a mobile device), but the possibility is already there for an artificial intelligence to start answering your correspondence in more detail.

What’s next?

Other programs already exist to help automate your email. Web-based app, Crystal, looks up the recipient of your email and makes suggestions about your tone and word choice to help you communicate in the style the recipient will respond to best. It determines this by looking up the person on social media and analysing their profiles.

Another program, the Quill natural language generation platform is already being used to write compelling articles based on specific sets of data. It was able to cover Wimbledon faster and better than human journalists, and like me, is a regular contributor to sites like Forbes. 

As Deep Learning becomes more and more sophisticated, who’s to say what advances will be made?  Maybe eventually you won’t have to respond to email at all… It will just be a huge network of apps all emailing each other into infinity…

What do you think of Google’s new Smart Reply feature? Would you use it (or have you already)? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts in the comments below.

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