
Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail - devhxinc
https://www.blog.google/products/gmail/subject-write-emails-faster-smart-compose-gmail
======
dmazin
This 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-s...](http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-side-
autocorrect/))

[1]
[https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references](https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references)

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The
same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general
rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case
what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's
popular radio or YouTube recommendations.

~~~
city41
I feel like we are becoming less homogeneous. When I was a kid everyone
watched cable television after dinner and everyone watched all of the same
shows. Thursday night was Friends. Friday night was Full House and Family
Matters, etc. Now I find everyone I know watches all kinds of shows, many of
which I've never even heard of. Not to mention YouTube which is whole new
layers upon layers of content. In an odd way, I actually kind of miss the
"bonding" cable television used to give the populace (but not really).

I just chose shows as an example. But I feel the same happens with reading,
music, technology, politics, etc.

~~~
givinguflac
Personally I think you’re both right. We are becoming less homogeneous as a
society, but the people within those subgroups interact much less than they
used to, at least in person.

~~~
dvfjsdhgfv
Yes, I think this is an accurate observation. There seems to be more variation
on the fringe and more homogeneity closer to the center (or over large areas).

------
smnrchrds
I 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.

~~~
kazinator
Here 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
The 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 :-)

~~~
kazinator
My comment is about _English_ lookup when the keyboard is flipped into romaji
mode, and the user isn't composing kana.

------
scrollaway
So 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))

~~~
_bxg1
At this point the only reason I haven't ditched Gmail is because that's the
email address I've used everywhere. Changing email addresses is even more
problematic than changing physical addresses these days.

The reason people are so upset is that it has a negative effect on the world
even if people have the option to turn it off (and don't), and it has
virtually no real benefit. It's the latest in the trend of tech companies
trying to solve problems that don't exist, and creating new ones in the
process.

At best, you'll never know if the person on the other end of the line
outsourced their response to Google. At worst, people's mental capacity for
expression and nuance will start to atrophy because they couldn't be bothered
to manually relate to another human being.

~~~
peatmoss
I've recommended it elsewhere in similar threads, but a nice middle ground
between self-hosted email (lots of work), and a straight-up
Gmail/Yahoo/Fastmail/Hotmail/Etc account is to buy your own domain and set up
your MX records in accordance with Fastmail's (or whoever's) instructions.

I've ported my email address / domain across several hosting providers now. I
don't have to retrain anyone.

Obviously this doesn't help you now, but maybe you can start training people
on to your new brundolf@superfancydomain.org email address to avoid this
problem in the hypothetical future when Fastmail becomes dystopian and gross.

~~~
toomuchtodo
The best time to start using your own domain for email was 10 years ago. The
second best time is today.

------
aerovistae
Good 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.

~~~
skybrian
Oh 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
If 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
At 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
People 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.

------
CryoLogic
These 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.

------
meeton
This 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.

~~~
hangonhn
Agreed. 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.

------
joelrunyon
Side 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
You'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.

------
ilaksh
Lol. 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.

------
venantius
Okay, 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
Seems like you want a mail merge feature, which does exist for emails.

------
ColinWright
Does this kill EasyMail (YC W18) ??

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650)

~~~
martinpw
Interesting that the comments on that link for this technology are much more
positive than the comments here.

------
rdiddly
Aha, 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!

------
fitzroy
"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

------
baxtr
I 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
Yes. 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.

~~~
rocqua
Let 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
But 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!

------
_bxg1
Smart 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
This comment already seems quaint after having seen the Duplex demo.

------
prlambert
I'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
Hi, thanks for offering to answer questions. Did you consider the language
homogenisation question and if so, how did you answer it?

~~~
prlambert
It'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
Okay 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).

------
scott_s
I go out of my way to _avoid_ banal phrases in my emails.

~~~
rahilb
Banal 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
They 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!

------
chatmasta
I 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
If 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.

------
pascalxus
Wasn'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
I 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.

------
njarboe
I 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.

------
SilasX
This is just extended auto-complete with the unintended reminder of how
predictable/cliche your writing is.

------
ijafri
Only 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

------
supermdguy
This 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)

------
Paul-ish
Maybe 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
So 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.

------
tysonzni
In 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.

------
mycorrhizal
Since 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.

------
parliament32
Why 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.

------
danra
I 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.

------
falcor84
I quite like this incremental approach towards AI, of providing a suggesting
assistant rather than trying to solve the full problem at once.

------
tbabb
Is this some kind of belated April Fool's joke?

------
pvdebbe
The 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.

------
Digit-Al
Those 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.

------
sampleinajar
This 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.

------
sunseb
I love tech, but it's kind of scary, I think we are heading towards a
dystopian future.

------
antonkm
> 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
Almost 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
Thanks for the clarification!

------
gesman
I 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.

------
imglorp
In 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.

------
raimue
"It looks like you're writing an email! Would you like help?"

------
mrguyorama
The "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.

------
Zolomon
Could anyone direct me to research material of how to implement a system like
this for a single language, or a collection of documents?

------
zitterbewegung
Is this not going to be a part of Inbox?

------
40acres
What's the difference between this and auto complete? I think there is a bit
of overreacting here.

------
ryanpcmcquen
Yet another reason to avoid Gmail.

------
vazamb
An so it begins... To anyone who has read Daemon by Daniel Suarez this sounds
very creepy.

------
_bxg1
Oh god this is even worse [https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-
impersonating-a-hum...](https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-
impersonating-a-human-is-scary-as-1825861987)

------
magwa101
Now where did they get all that training data...

------
hknd
Feels like auto-complete from any IDE - love it.

------
amelius
I want this for code, not email ...

~~~
brlewis
I'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.

------
komali2
What's the point of humans

~~~
komali2
From "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.

------
geophile
Clippy 2.0.

------
aantix
I feel like I could type these robotic responses as fast if not faster than it
takes Google to "help" me.

~~~
nascar_is_bad
it's not for you. it's for grandma

~~~
diggan
I 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.

