
A critique of Gmail's “smart replies” - userbinator
https://medium.com/@okh/please-resist-googles-attempts-to-make-you-more-robotlike-2f5babd786aa
======
sp332
"As a Google ML ethics guy, I need a drink."
[https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1060991160494120961](https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1060991160494120961)

~~~
lgregg
I started reading the thread and laughed fairly loud and disruptively when I
read this:

so, it turns out that our users are using our product for...

[spins Wheel of User Behavior]

... divination.

[https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1060991848280256512](https://twitter.com/Theophite/status/1060991848280256512)

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glacials
The author seems to imply the smart reply buttons immediately send an email
with the chosen phrase. This is incorrect. They open an email draft beginning
with the chosen phrase.

There are many times I've used one of these buttons to begin a much more
detailed email. Not only do they save a few keystrokes, but they help you get
past that first wave of "blank canvas" writer's block.

~~~
ben509
Heh... despite seeing them on literally every email I've responded to, so
possibly hundreds of times, I have never been okay with sending a derpy "That
sounds great!" email, so I never realized they don't automatically send it.

It's amazing that they managed to fail at discoverability despite putting the
controls right in front of me.

~~~
abainbridge
I have the same problem with messaging apps, where I can't tell whether
pressing return inserts a newline or sends the message. I find myself avoiding
newlines altogether because I'm scared of pressing return. Or, accidentally
hitting return and sending a half formed jumbled mess to my boss/customer.

Please, developers of the world, make return insert a new line. It's much
easier to undo than message-send.

~~~
userbinator
_where I can 't tell whether pressing return inserts a newline or sends the
message._

Do you have any examples of messaging apps where return/enter inserts a
newline? I can't think of a single one where it _doesn 't_ send the message,
probably because inserting a newline is an uncommon case but sending is not.
It's been that way since the days of IRC, from what I remember.

~~~
setr
There's always been a division between "(IRC) messaging" and "(BBS) forums",
and the relevant influence-trees, with I think the biggest line drawn is how
the return key is handled. From this one UX feature, every other
differentiation is natural.

This division was fine, because they served different purposes. Messaging
(return => send) was always short term, quick communications; Forums (return
=> newline) was always longer-form posts, sentences to paragraphs, in a single
post. The forum for discussion worth archiving, and the messaging app to
replicate daily communications.

But slack and its kin crossed that line. They pitch themselves as the utility
of forums (archiving, search, "starring", etc), with the quickness of
messaging (rapid response times, notifications, etc), and now everything is
fucked. Forum-like conversation get stuffed into a Messaging application, and
gets broken up into a hundred different messages (ala 1/20, 2/20..20/20
twitter multi-posts), perhaps collapsed into a single proper post but usually
not; Logs get stuffed into it, into a separate channel whose sole purpose is
to be muted. Documents and emails and any work gets stuffed into it, because
it can be made to fit.

And naturally, the archiving, the search, the document storage, everything
breaks down, and its awful. Until you realize that you can't use slack like
slack wants you to. It's a better, smoother, more maintainable and convenient
BBS forum, trapped in a messaging shell.

The return => send is feared, and it is a fear special to slack, and its many
recent derivatives. Because slack crossed the line, without crossing it.
Messaging apps _should_ have return => send; slack (and its kin) _should_ have
return => newline, because it is not a messaging app. It is _not_ IRC, and it
is not counted amongst IRC's friends.

It is a forum in denial.

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derefr
I've always taken these Smart Replies as equivalent to Facebook Messenger's
"button that sends a big thumbs-up emoji to acknowledge something." (It
replaces the Send button when you don't have anything in the input box.)

I.e., these responses are there to serve as various textual forms of "I
acknowledge that I received your message and am hereby discharging your social
expectation that I will reply to it, by doing so with an information-free
message."

I assume that Gmail _would_ just suggest using an emoji rather than text,
except for the fact that 1. etiquette says that an emoji is too "casual" for
office work, but a one-word answer is just fine and exemplary in its
professionalism; and 2. there are devices still in use that _can_ receive
email but are old enough that they _can 't_ display emoji, so textual
equivalents are a better lowest-common-denominator.

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jetrink
For an interview last year, I interacted with Google recruiting almost
entirely using smart replies. One of the suggestions to the initial email was
fit to send without modification and the idea was so amusing to me that I
stuck with it as much as possible throughout the process. It wouldn't surprise
me if the other end of the conversation was mostly machine generated as well;
two Google systems talking to each other with a bit of human editing here or
there.

~~~
QML
I did this recently as well! It kind of reminds me of a Black Mirror episode,
“Hang the DJ”, where a dating app used ‘cookies’ to arrange matchings between
people. I actually wished someone could invent this for the recruitment
process—a stand-in AI that deals with all the boring parts of life.

~~~
remify
There was a thread a few weeks ago about a guy who did a bot that responded to
recruiter asking them relevant question about job (salary, relocation etc...).

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flatline
What I find more disagreeable is the newly enabled autosuggest feature. Few
things are more annoying than seeing bad suggestions pop up for every word, on
a desktop device where I type at 100wpm.

Edit: word.

~~~
stcredzero
I'd say that's true efficiency. They are managing to annoy you at a rate
approaching 100 times per minute!

~~~
ben509
The robot uprising has already begun!

~~~
stcredzero
Annoying us is probably their maximum capability for now.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/)

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userbinator
_When you respond with “Thanks for sharing!” or “Glad you enjoyed it!” or
“Very cool!” to an email message, you are not responding as an in-the-wild
human. You are responding as a human that has been prompted by a robot._

I know someone whose blog is configured to filter out such vacuous "empty
praise" comments, because 99% of the time they are from spambots.

~~~
dbcurtis
In fact, that could be a feature. Instead of “smart reply”, how about “smarter
not to reply”:

“The reply you have entered is not actionable. Do you still want to send it?”

Nip vacuous e-mail in the bud.

~~~
hammock
Gmail sells ad impressions. So less email is not good for business.

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vl
_With the largest pile in the world of written natural language representing
dynamic human communication, Google is able to use deep learning, combined
with the methods of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to draw inferences about
the essential content and intent of your emails and sort them into types._

 _Using these same machine learning methods, a trio of possible responses to a
given type of email message is generated and tested. Every time a human uses
one of these three responses, a datapoint is supplied to Google that says
“given message type A, a human has chosen response X as an appropriate one.”_

 _Multiply this last step by a thousand or a million or a gazillion, to the
point where a clear statistical pattern emerges, and Google can conclude with
some confidence that when a person expresses ideas, thoughts, feelings, or
questions that can be classified as type A, it’s reasonable for another human
to respond with utterance X._

This is usual attribution of magical powers to "AI" (and really they mean
"ML") by the people who don't know how it actually works.

In this case:

* Sensitivity detector checks if email is sensitive, smart reply is turned off for sensitive emails (obviously didn't trigger in this case). I personally think this is questionable feature - imagine your keyboard turns off if it thinks topic is sensitive.

* Encoder model produces embedding which is compared with pre-computed and pre-clustered embeddings for whitelisted replies. Top replies for three top clusters are selected (selecting replies without clustering will produce very similar replies). All potential replies are white-listed for obvious reasons.

While clicks produce useful metrics (really, this is the target metric), they
don't produce useful training data for two reasons: (roughly speaking) you
can't train a model on it's own output and there is no way for model to learn
to suggest something new. Fundamental challenge for training such models is
that production metric is different from training metric: model is trained to
select likely reply that was typed, production metric is reply that is
clicked.

There is bunch of blog posts and papers from Google Research describing how it
works.

------
nimos
My main concern with things like this and autocomplete is can they actually
influence how the user thinks and what they say? It would be interesting to
have users write about a subject with a "good adjective"/"bad adjective"
biased AI and see if there is a measurable difference in opinion on the
subject afterwards between groups.

~~~
vl
For Google, Facebook and others, as a companies, best users to maximize long-
term revenue are people that have income and choose to spend all their
disposable income (and thus generate ad and lead conversion profits). As such,
Google should show/suggest/autoplay search results/ads/YouTube videos/smart
replies/assistant answers/News/Google Now cards to increase life-time
likelihood for the given user to become working professional and mindless
spender.

For specific hypothetical example, it's not hard to imagine, that training
users to prefer things like "experiences" or entertainment that need to be re-
purchased is better that promoting physical goods, like board games or
bicycles.

~~~
TheDong
This has got to be some sort of fallacy. It rings similar to the "if evolution
selected for good traits, why can't we fly and shoot lasers out of our eyes?"

Yes, its to their benefit if their users have money. No, I don't think there's
any chance that any company is able to optimize for someone gaining a middle-
class life that meaningfully.

Companies do small-scale user studies and measure things like engagement and
increased clicks on a small scale. They do not perfectly capture their user's
income and spending level for many years and correlate that well enough with
the company's auto-suggestions that said suggestions optimize for that very
macro goal over the very micro measurements they make.

I think it's very hard to imagine Google successfully optimizing itself to
meaningfully lead do that outcome for users, just as it's very hard to imagine
humans evolving the ability to fly.

~~~
vl
Current recommendations systems for FB, Google/YouTube have switched from
models that try to increase immediate engagement to models that try to
increase retention because it turned out that optimizing for immediate
engagement decreases retention. (Latter is obviously much harder ML task
requiring Q-learning, longer data series, etc.) In other words companies
choose to sacrifice immediate revenue in order to increase long-term
(optimally life-time) revenue from each particular user.

You can see it an example of early precursor of ML that shapes user behavior:
learning what motivates user to return and then displaying it.

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_cs2017_
If you write an email to someone, and they respond with one word
"Interesting", you should take a hint that you're boring them out of their
minds. Don't blame robots for that :)

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eslaught
I do find it surprising how often a short reply (of any kind) just isn't
appropriate, but Google goes ahead and makes a suggestion anyway. I would have
thought that "no quick response" would have been one of the options they
trained against.

~~~
fifnir
They trained against the champions of get-the-last-word from all over the
internet

------
fipple
Gmail Smart Replies often suggest things that I’d like to say to my fiancée
but have the common sense not to.

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tyingq
My android has suggested "Thanks Honey" as a SMS reply to people where that
wouldn't go over well. Gmail hasn't done that yet.

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kristianc
Use them if you like, don't use them if you like, write a self-aggrandising
piece to draw attention to how smart you are if you like too. This is faux-
problematizing.

------
bitpush
Next thing you'll say is I miss the world where everybody's mail looked
different because of unique handwriting, and this email thing has made me look
like a robot.

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Konnstann
Auto-replies save me the hassle of personally typing out an acknowledgement of
receipt or confirmation of a meeting, which I find very useful. I don't get
the problem with an optional feature which clearly makes certain types of
common emails easier to deal with.

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lazyasciiart
> The thing to remember about email is that it is a conversation.

I think this is a big claim and not obviously true enough to just assume.
Email is just a medium, and can be any kind of communication within that -
just like not all spoken communication is a conversation.

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scarejunba
Nah, it’s fine. I like it. I have autocomplete in my IDE but I sometimes write
unique code.

------
taude
Can't read article, it wants me to pay $5.

~~~
shopkins
Obligatory life-saving browser extension:
[https://makemediumreadable.com](https://makemediumreadable.com)

~~~
pickdenis
Why do people even use Medium? Doesn't this kind of stuff go against the ethos
of being a computer scientist?

~~~
QML
Easier to set up / integrate and looks better than most Wordpress themes that
I’ve seen set up.

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gambiting
An honest question - have you ever used any of these auto replies, ever?

I don't recall any situation, not even once, where they would be relevant to
what I received. The most insane thing is that I receive auto-reply
suggestions in English, even when the email was not written in English.

If this is the best that Google's "world-leading AI" can come up with, then
I'm not worried about AI taking over the world. Not even slightly.

~~~
vasco
Most of the times they are correct but not sufficient, but I've used it enough
times that I don't mind the suggestions being there 100% of the time. I do
write tend to write terse emails though.

The newest "press tab to auto-complete word/sentence" while I'm typing though,
that's incredible and I've used it in every email since I got the feature. A
real time saver - and sometimes makes me sound more eloquent too!

------
j45
I'm sure it's coming, but it would be nice if the smart replies used more of
my phrases instead of Google's reccomendations, and mixed them up so it's no
so obvious that you clicked on a smart reply. Also, clicking a smart reply
doesn't automatically send the email, and still requires another click. It
might be a good feature to "feel lucky" with when clicking.

------
xte
I switch from GMail to a personal mail tired of their non-standard IMAP, their
more and more heavy webUI more and more tied to Chrome. So...

BTW switching to personal mail not only improve my workflow but also push me
to expand my knowledge like never before. Now my personal, notmuch
based+scripts automation automate far, far, far more than Google and far
better. If I'd like to have template replay I can add them in a snap.

------
ken
> Users of Gmail — and there’s at least a 50 percent chance that’s you — have
> noticed an “upgrade”

I wonder: for all the people in the world using Gmail, how many use their web
interface? I'm a "Gmail user" but I only access it via native mail clients. I
haven't actually tried logging in to Gmail using a web browser in forever, so
I never see their latest feature that everyone loves/hates.

------
tareqak
I do wish the smart reply could pick out the intended recepient's name, or
have the ability to pick it off of a drop down / additional three options. I
can see people considering smart replies to be inauthentic, but all I need to
say is "Thanks X!" or "That's great X", and get back to whatever else I was
doing.

The four maxims in the article are really spot on.

~~~
Casseres
Some people might find that too creepy or think Google is "reading" their
emails.

~~~
tareqak
The smart reply feature is already doing just that. If they aren't going to
stop and we can't make them, then they could at least add the finishing
touches to the feature.

------
moneil971
I have used these on LinkedIn, especially to respond to requests from people I
don't know or am not actually connected to -- as the writer notes, it isn't
really appropriate to actual email from friends and family. Though I suspect
all of these are meant for people replying from a phone or watch who don't
want to bother typing.

------
goodmachine
"Thanks, I'll check it out"

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colanderman
You know what's worse? The damn "Smart Compose" dialog box that pops up _and
stops me from typing_.

I cannot begin to fathom what deranged design flow led to Google creating a UI
element that is _objectively worse than Clippy_.

------
homero
I love these. They help me start an email otherwise I write ok or something.
They're also getting better and more variety. They do need to get longer
though. Give me a few sentences I can personalize.

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cpv
LinkedIn also happens to have interesting answers. Which I don't use.

Or skype, I had to disable it, because it looked like complete gibberish (some
English suggestions for non english messages).

------
rajacombinator
I’m as google-pessimistic as the next guy, but I really struggle to see the
problem in providing these quick reply options. Their phrase complete is great
also.

------
dools
Haha I love those things. Because I'm Australian one of them says "Got it,
mate!"

A constant reminder that AI is thousands of years from taking over humanity.

------
avitzurel
On a slightly unrelated note, when did Medium start blocking content and
prompting you to upgrade? I can't read this article.

~~~
avitzurel
When logged in, I was prompted to upgrade. Incognito let me read the article

------
NelsonMinar
Thanks for the link!

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p0nce
Well said.

~~~
NelsonMinar
I agree.

~~~
p0nce
Thanks!

------
tkcins
He shouldn't have blurred the text in [0], as blurred text could be read using
techniques I admit knowing nothing about. It's better to just use a black
block or something like that. Pixelating is bad too.

[0] [https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*h8cIVhi7n9-vuNJ-1...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/2000/1*h8cIVhi7n9-vuNJ-1pWBhg.png)

Edit: I just noticed parts of the concealed text have been "smudged" before
blurred. So no risk here. Still valid as a PSA :)

~~~
51lver
Personally I prefer replacing the text and then applying a light blur. Let
them feel smart for a few seconds.

------
jbhatab
This is ridiculous... I hate when robots auto fill in boring emails I have to
send 100s of times a day!!!

~~~
dang
Could you please review the site guidelines? This comment breaks two:

 _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._

 _Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that 's easier to criticize._

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
RRRA
very simply, it never makes sense...

------
moftz
I try not to respond to emails with one liners. If it deserves a response, it
deserves a complete thought. I hate sending something to someone and getting a
"thanks" reply back. I get that you appreciated what I sent you but if your
reply isn't going to affect anything, don't respond. Shoot me an IM if you
really need to give me a one liner.

~~~
reaperducer
_I try not to respond to emails with one liners._

I have a co-worker who does this. She sends me data files with "Please
review."

So I've started responding with things like, "It had a good beat, but I
couldn't dance to it. Three stars." Or, "Excellent datas!!eleven! Fast
shipping! Goog eBayer, would buy again!"

She's still sending me the one-liners, but at least I'm having fun.

~~~
ben509
Just run file against them and send the results back.

