Gmail’s Smart Compose Will Write Emails For You

Gmail users have had Smart Reply for over a year, but the mail service is getting even smarter.

At its annual developer conference, Google CEO- Sundar Pichai- announced Smart Compose, an upcoming feature that would finish entire sentences for you as you compose.

“Last year, we introduced Smart Reply in Gmail to help you quickly reply to incoming emails. Today, we’re announcing Smart Compose, a new feature powered by artificial intelligence, to help you draft emails from scratch, faster,” Google stated. “Because it operates in the background, you can write an email like you normally would, and Smart Compose will offer suggestions as you type. When you see a suggestion that you like, click the ‘tab’ button to use it.”

The feature is an extension of Gmail’s Smart Reply feature. Smart Compose will suggest complete sentences within the body of an email as you are writing. It will operate in the background, and if you see a phrase pop up that you like, just hit tab to select it, and the text will auto-populate. Not only will this help save time when writing emails, Google says it will help reduce the chance of you sending off something with a grammar or spelling error.

Smart Compose also recognises context. For example, if it’s Friday, it might suggest closing out your message with “Have a great weekend!” and also when you type a sentence in an email, lighter text to potentially complete the sentence will appear. For example, if you type “My address is,” you’ll have the opportunity to auto-complete the sentence with your address.

Smart Compose will appear in the next few weeks to customers who opted for the refreshed version of Gmail. It will be made available for G Suite customers in the workplace in the coming months. Users must enable the new Gmail by going to Settings > “Try the new Gmail.” From here, they go to the general tab in settings, scroll down and enable “experimental access.”

Smart Compose is relatively minor in the flood of announcements coming out of the Google I/O developer conference .But it illustrates that Google’s larger investment in AI and its effort to show to wary consumers of its benefits.

Stay tuned for more Google I/O developers conference updates.