
Please don't send me smart replies - walterbell
http://www.engadget.com/2016/05/19/google-smart-replies-are-dehumanizing/
======
ACow_Adonis
Are you tired of having a personality, original thought, or actual
conversation?

Are your friends selfishly taking up time trying to talk to you when you could
be adding more people to your friends list instead?

Do you have a craving for increased amounts of non-genuine social interaction?

Has your life become so depressingly repeatable that our algorithms can
accurately represent your superficial chatter?

If so, we've got something for you: SMART REPLIES!

SMART REPLIES! For when your communication is so valuable and necessary it
doesn't need you!

SMART REPLIES! Yum clams! So cute!

SMART REPLIES!...if you thought twitter and social-networking was inane, you
ain't seen nothing yet...

Edit: I apologise, i just had a reflex reaction. Wow...this is the world we're
making for ourselves...

~~~
1stop
Should we now have an existential crisis when the smart reply is exactly what
we were going to say? Should we type it anyway just to teach the machine it
was right?

Should we save our outrage for something more then a feature in an announced
chat app?

~~~
cam_l
So is it just me who types a reply even when the app knows exactly what I was
going to say.. just because I find it morally repulsive.

..and still feel a little bit guilty for being so bloody shallow.

~~~
1stop
Are you shallow? Or is Google's "Intelligence" deep?

------
jrockway
I like smart replies. They are not quite the exact words I would normally use,
but they're close, so I kind of enjoy selecting them as a sort of novelty. In
that sense, it's kind of like spellcheck (which tells me I just misspelled
spellcheck). If I was replying to those texts, it would have gone something
like that:

> What are you up to?

>> Work.

or

> Want to hang out?

>> Sure.

The suggestions Google provides are a little bit more upbeat and amusing to
me.

> What are you up to?

>> I am working!

or

> Want to hang out?

>> I'd love to.

I especially like how it inverts how I'd normally use exclamation marks and
periods. "I'm working." "I'd love to!" etc.

Anyway, neat feature. The author doesn't like it, I do, so she can not use the
feature and I can use it :P

~~~
ACow_Adonis
Perhaps its the smartarse Australian larrikin in me, but these kinds of
automated responses depress me, because I can see them working like corporate
new-speak: they're going to push us to limit our communication down to a bunch
of canned responses, emotions and interactions.

Sometimes I think AI isn't advancing at all, its just that we're all working
more and more to fall in line like good automatons...

I love sarcasm, dead-pan, violently black-humour...and I'm watching it all
slowly disappear and we all become pidgeonholed, public, on-show, quantised
and sanitised.

I'd much rather bring back:

>What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call you
back in 5?

>Want to hang out? >> I'm in the bathroom, so in a way, I already am...

> _sends through that picture of child holding flower_ >> Sometimes that
> shark, he looks right into you. Right into your eyes. You know the thing
> about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye.
> When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'. Until he bites ya and those
> black eyes roll over white. And then, ah...

Oh, but the two are unrelated you say...

Well no. I'm not certain that they are...

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _> What are you up to? >> In middle of school shooting. Cops on way. Call
> you back in 5?_

These days, that sounds like something that would make SWAT invite themselves
into your house, through a window.

The responses are sure cute and creative. I seriously doubt whoever writes
like this today will change their ways because of "smart replies". Most people
don't write stuff like that, definitely not during _most_ of the
conversations.

I don't really have a formed view yet. I think getting outraged over someone
using augmented software to respond faster is wrong, and only a problem with
the person who gets outraged. On the other hand I do appreciate the effect of
limiting the potential conversation space if people get _too_ dependent those
reply suggestions.

It is also true though that a lot of conversations one has over e-mail or IMs
follow so common patterns that there were many times I wished I could just
automate it away, to have a bot reply to them without the other side knowing.
Maybe I'm just antisocial? But I tend to differentiate between requests for
information from requests for personal attention, and wouldn't mind having my
bot handle all of the former.

(Then again, I wouldn't accept anything except a bot I wrote myself, so maybe
I'm not _that_ antisocial - since I'd be just spawning a part of myself as an
external process. That's also one reason why I'm so pissed about all the
modern bot / AI tech from Google, et al., which has _zero_ configurability,
_zero_ ways to plug your own stuff in yourself.)

~~~
yougavemehope
If you dislike talking to someone so much that you wish you could automate it
away, why are you talking to them to begin with?

This seems similar or related to the need people seem to have to remain
permanently connected even to people who they only met for a few seconds at a
bar once, to increase that ever-important "friend count". Some relationships
are meant to end. It's not healthy to try to maintain 1000 vaguely familiar
people as "friends".

The ridiculous thing is, most of those "friends" are dreading having to
pretend to care about the things you, the guy they met for a few seconds once
but feel bad deleting, post on the internet as well. Just stop it. Neither
side wins in forced out-of-sympathy/fear/loyalty/obligation/etc relationships.

~~~
karmajunkie
Because my mother (and lots of other people I care about) don't understand how
draining it can be for someone like me to carry on a conversation sometimes.
Maybe having a high friend count is something you feel the need to deal with,
but for others of us software like this might actually solve a problem. Please
reserve your judgement on our social protocols for... Nobody.

(Disclaimer: I don't use allo so I don't know what it's capable of. I kind of
doubt it's there yet. )

------
rrego
The author didn't exactly spell it out, but I found the suggestions to be so
adequate that they become what i want to say. They become limiting in a sense.

The simulated conversation image is a great example. After seeing those
responses, the response 'aww so cute' or 'Love the daisy' are about about the
same or better than what I can or would care to think of in a text
conversation. Is there really a better way to think answer that and why should
I waste the time to do so?

~~~
panic
I think that's the point of the article: using "smart replies" makes it seem
like you're so disinterested in your conversation partner that you consider
coming up with your own responses a waste of time.

~~~
1stop
But isn't that a pretty common use case?

Do people on chat with their nearest and dearest? Or do they chat with a mix
of people who they may like or even dislike.

~~~
TeMPOraL
It is, and honestly - I find expecting from the other side to be always fully
committed to you in a conversation to be a sign of _disrespect_. I guess some
people want to feel more important to others that they really are.

It also depends on the discussion. Whenever someone talks to me about
something requiring my personal attention, I pay that attention. But most
conversations with people are _trivial_ , and expecting someone to drop
everything they were concentrating on and pay full attention to your trivial
question is, again, a sign of disrespect.

------
timothya
Yeah, and please also don't send me any messages where you chose
autocompletions for the words, or messages where your phone autocorrected the
spelling of. Heck, don't even send messages where you pressed the keyboard
buttons to spell out the words, it's far to impersonal and dehumanizing to be
limited to the options your phone presents; people should communicate like
they were meant to: by talking to each other face-to-face.

\---

With Smart Replies (as with other communication-helping technology), meaning
comes from how and when you choose to use them, and there's no reason you
shouldn't choose to use them when it communicates what you were intending. If
I was going to say "Yes!" and that's a Smart Reply option, why shouldn't I
save the time and choose it? It was still my action that sent that message,
still my choice to send it, still the meaning that I wanted to communicate.
Smart Replies save time for the simple stuff, so you can better spend your
time on other messages that you might write manually.

------
gabemart
The reason smart replies seem a bit sad to me is that, unlike new forms of
communication that have come before, they don't introduce any new scope for
creativity.

Text messages, twitter and snapchat may have made conversations lighter, less
substantial and more throwaway, but they have cultivated a rich flora of
memes, silly jokes, new ways of sharing. Even emoji, which at first blush also
seem like a very lazy way of communicating, have taken on cultural relevance
and can be used in interesting and fresh ways.

A smart reply is a smart reply. The best case scenario is that it was close
enough to what you were going to say anyway that the small difference in
content is outweighed by the reduced effort of not having to type or think. It
cannot lead to new forms of creative expression because its very use demands
not expressing yourself more succinctly but instead expressing yourself less
precisely. Expressing less of yourself.

------
dingo_bat
I like the smart replies. And my girlfriend loves it too. The replies look to
be relevant and optional. So when you don't have time to type out a proper
response, use the suggestion. Otherwise who's stopping you from typing out by
hand?

>Further, I don't care how intelligent these Smart Replies are: They can never
capture the personality and character of a real human conversation.

Really? Tell that to the people living in the time before Alphago made it's
37th move and astounded Lee Sedol himself. AI is here, it is as smart or
smarter in some areas. The number of such areas is going to grow. Get used to
it.

~~~
dmoy
I can't wait for the first reality or game show based around Turing tests.
That's going to be seriously uncomfortable, but fascinating.

~~~
bostik
Please find a way to get that idea in front of Charlie Brooker. It could make
for a pretty good Black Mirror episode.

(And while we are on the subject.. There was a blog post back in 2005 about
the inverse situation: if the person behind the other screen has the
preconception that you are a bot, convincing them of your humanity is nearly
impossible. The post now lives as a PDF document.[0])

0:
[https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turi...](https://msu.edu/~pennock5/courses/ALife/Striegel_Failed_Turing_test.pdf)

------
onion2k
How would the recipient know whether I've used the "Yum clams!" smart reply or
typed in the same thing myself? If you can't tell then how is the author of
the article going to act on his self-righteous anger about what his friends
choose to do with their time?

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's exactly my feelings too. If the author gets outraged about the
possibility of using autosuggested responses instead of typing them in
manually, I suggest that the author has some issues.

------
grogenaut
About 8 years ago I was jokingly going to write this for guys who were too
dumb or lazy or to much of a 20 something to auto write back to girls they met
out. My girlfriend, future wife was horrified by the idea. The waitresses at
the bar were like "Meh... at least he though enough to enter me into the
system and he'll remember to talk to me." My wife threatened bloody murder on
me as she couldn't trust that I wasn't using it on her... and now google wants
to do it on a facebook level, eg society wide. Well this will be worth a good
laugh and cry with my wife.

[Edit: spelling, clarification]

~~~
ggggtez
"these darned kids with their doing of thing that I don't like".

~~~
grogenaut
Yeah that's was mostly my reaction to my wife's reaction. My thought was it
would help people get over the awkward part. This seems like it'd be more
endemic to all communications.

Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you notes
about the caller on the call screen. Supposed to be for sales people to put
stuff like "Wife Jane, 3 kids, Bobby, Sue, Jamal" to read before they picked
up.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Then again I remember seeing on the palm pre a feature that showed you
> notes about the caller on the call screen._

Is there anything wrong with that? Seems very useful.

(How do people think how previous generations handled having many
acquaintances and still knowing something personal about each of them? They
noted things down, on paper.)

~~~
grogenaut
It seems fine in the small but immediately imagined sales guy in a smarmy
voice saying how's Betty and the kids. That said I thought it was a great
idea. Heck at the time I was working with about 80 people from a customer and
having it say jake (junior java dev... insurance ingestion...mega insurance
inc) would have been great. Oh well my cynical snarky self is conflicted now.

------
andywood
This changes real life into an RPG conversation tree.

~~~
praptak
Actually my dream when I was a teenage gamer.

------
nlawalker
>> ...Smart Replies seems like an unnecessarily lazy way to have a
conversation.

 _Text messaging_ is a lazy way to have a conversation; this is a perfect fit.
If you want to have a real conversation, call me, or meet me for lunch. Or do
the former to arrange the latter (novel!).

~~~
supercoder
I reckon it might be a little inconvenient to meet someone for lunch everytime
you want to say something to them.

~~~
vidarh
But that is exactly the point. It is inconvenient, so when you choose to do
it, it implies you care more about that conversation.

It doesn't mean e-mail isn't perfectly fine for a lot of conversation, but you
should expect people to treat it accordingly: You care enough to write an
e-mail instead of an IM, but not enough to call them or a arrange a face to
face.

Sometimes it's perfectly appropriate to convey that. Sometimes it's not.

------
1123581321
In Inbox, I've found that emailing a screenshot of the smart reply I've
chosen, instead of clicking it, is the first sarcastic way to use it. It takes
longer, doesn't improve future suggestions, and makes explicitly clear I'm not
replying creatively.

~~~
eva1984
Yeah, after the initial hype, I found myself rarely using this feature. But I
still thought it is cool, just not usefully cool...

------
orblivion
Pretty soon you'll have "I'm feeling lucky" mode where Google carries on the
entire conversation for both you and your friend. You just look at your
calendar at the end to see what weekend plans you just worked out.

~~~
cJ0th
That was my first thought when I read it. Eventually you'll go to a cafe to
meet your friend and you greet him with "So, ... google wants me to talk to
you today."

However, it is funny to see "normal people" getting more and more used to this
kind of living while slowly more and more tech people find it disgusting.
Imagine a future where only nerds are capable of small talk!

------
jeffjose
Almost everything that technology touched has been 'dehumanized' in some way
or the other. It was initially email. How can I take something seriously if
its sent as an email, and when the sender has virutally zero cost in doing so.
Overtime, we've come to accept that as a norm

I'd reckon smart replies would follow a similar path. Might look odd, but
would become natural in a few years.

------
bipson
I understand what the author of this post means, and actually I agree with the
sentiment, but I still find the feature useful.

I think the problem lies with the examples, and frankly, it is up to you how
you use the feature.

Yes, if I write my SO "I love you", I expect him/her to reply with a honest "I
love you too" that was not actually a computer replying. It is a philosophical
question obviously, whether you see a response written by somebody or by the
algorithm, if he/she actually selected it.

But if I just get a "I'm 5 mins late" from my friend, I don't think a "Don't
worry, I'll wait" suggested by the algorithm is that bad and I myself would
not mind getting such a "algorithmically suggested" response by my friend.
After all, the other party selected the response himself, so I think it is
honest.

I'm pretty sure Google had these or similar discussions internally as well.

~~~
robzyb
> But if I just get a "I'm 5 mins late" from my friend, I don't think a "Don't
> worry, I'll wait" suggested by the algorithm is that bad and I myself would
> not mind getting such a "algorithmically suggested" response by my friend.
> After all, the other party selected the response himself, so I think it is
> honest.

Except, suggesting "Don't worry I wait" means that the person might click
that, instead of typing "ok".

This is a problem if you know the person well, and know that a response of
"ok" in the situation indicates they are annoyed at you, etc.

~~~
bipson
That's what I meant when I said I expect him to honestly mean it if he selects
a message. If a suggested message doesn't relate to his real sentiments, I
would expect him not to select it.

Maybe I did not understand you though?

------
simula67
I was agreeing with the overall point of the article, but then I see this :

> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!"
> if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to
> get back to the business of driving

I can't. Please do not use your phone while driving. You are not just putting
yourself, but others around you in danger.

------
Shish2k
Yesterday, Engadget published "Please don't send me Smart Replies", an opinion
piece on automating communication. One of its key features is being written in
ASCII, which makes use of a standard set of fonts if you don't feel like
writing with a real pen for whatever reason. Similar to the ASCII feature in
Inbox, it's apparently clever enough re-format lines to fit on different sized
screens. While this seems like a neat feature at first, I ultimately wouldn't
want any of my friends to use it in a conversation with me. In fact, I'd feel
pretty insulted.

See, I think having ASCII completely misses the point of a blog post. I can
understand using canned characters for article indexes so that a publication
can have a consistent style. But for the article itself, then ASCII seems like
an unnecessarily lazy way to write a post.

In this blog post, for example, Nicole gave a demonstration on how you could
use italics to stress particular words or "\--" to emulate an em-dash. Are you
so devoid of creativity that you can't stylize your text by yourself? Is
writing so much of a hassle that you can't use the appropriate characters
before posting?

Further, I don't care how readable these ASCII posts are: They can never
capture the personality and character of a hand written letter. Having the
option of ASCII encourages me to give a more straightforward response rather
than coming up with something that's perhaps more emblematic of my real
personality. It's dehumanizing.

But more than that, using ASCII instead of your own lines and curves robs your
friend of you. It means that you don't value the friendship enough to fully
engage in the conversation. You'd rather have a robot do all the rendering for
you instead of spending time and energy on them. That's terrible.

I know, I know, ASCII is optional. You don't have to use it. But if we're any
kind of friends at all, I sure as hell hope you don't.

~~~
nicky0
UTF-8 would have been more apropos, but I get the point.

------
178235235
I found the entire google io presentation to be extremely bizarre and
disturbing. I literally felt like smashing all of my electronics and running
into the jungle.

------
eva1984
I don't like the smart replies, but for a different reason.

It will only work under very generic situation with borderline functional
replies. For me, that kind of conversation is just a small part of the every
communication.

Human conversation is more organic than the demo tries to lead you to think.
Details in the words and sentences convey very subtle but identifiable
personality traits that the current algorithm cannot capture.

So, it is a really cool feature and a great showcase of recent advancements in
applying deep learning to natural language. But it is pretty much a gimmick
for now, and I will stay sceptical about whether this is going to turn user
around and become a killer feature of Allo, after all if my friends didn't use
this, neither will I.

------
decayy
I agree with the article. My friends and I have a complex lingo we use in our
text messages and the lingo itself can sometimes be a topic of the
conversation.

The "smart" replies seems to robotic and i'm sure many people would find it
rude if they got them.

------
invaliduser
It will be funny when sending the same photo to several friends, and receiving
tens of identical "Love the daisy" answers.

------
xarien
They're efficient and that's reason enough to like them. I'm also the type
who'd rather compose or read a one line email instead of having to wade
through a shit sandwich, but hey, that's just me.

------
andrei_says_
Now how about a video of a conversation between two or more people only using
smart replies?

\- always pressing the first option

\- randomly choosing an option with their eyes closed

\- pressing on the microphone and speaking gibberish or making gutteral sounds

I'd watch that

~~~
TeMPOraL
Twitch Plays Smart Replies?

------
dkopi
I suspect a lot of the debate here might end up divided along gender lines.
Men and women tend to communicate differently (of course this is a
generalization, and doesn't apply for all men or all women) - with men often
valuing short, efficient and informative replies.

I think smart replies are a great advance towards communicating quickly and
efficiently - which is the use case for most text conversations. But it is
important to realize when we expect communication to be more descriptive and
personal.

------
chaostheory
As the author already points out, this is the main purpose of smart replies:

> I can understand canned responses like "Be right there!" or "I'll be late!"
> if you're in a car and only have a few seconds to reply before you have to
> get back to the business of driving.

I typically only use them when I'm busy and I see a message and respond to it
from my watch.

------
Al-Khwarizmi
I agree so much with this post that I thought it would be so obvious that no
one would even write it down... I mean... are actual people really planning to
use this feature? Because it is a horrible idea in my view to delegate our
social conversations to a robot. When I saw it, as a CS researcher myself, I
thought "this is really great tech" as a concept, but I wouldn't even consider
using it for anything else than curiosity/testing purposes.

The idea of automation is automating things we don't want to do, talking to
friends is definitely something I want to do myself. What will be the next
thing, a robot that has sex in our place?

OTOH I'm curious as to where this will lead in the future... smart replies
replying to smart replies and generating an entire conversation between two
people without them even reading it? Telling your robot "Hey, robot, I want
you to find me a guy between ages 25 and 30 for a date tonight, he should be
dark-haired and like dogs" and the robot interacting with other robots until
it finds someone compatible? That sure would be handy for some shy people :)

------
dampflames
The tone of this article is really off-putting and I disagree that it's about
laziness or something similar. I'm really shy and take a lot of time to think
of even a simple reply sometimes, and often end up not replying at all, so
this would probably improve some of my communication.

------
xlm1717
I understand that Smart Replies takes away a very personal part of a
conversation, and might even lead to just a couple of AIs talking to each
other, but if it reduces sarcasm it can't be all that bad!

------
WWKong
We need a messenger that anticipates what conversation I want to start with
whom and auto sends that message. Then on the other side the reply is smart
automatic. In effect it will be machines talking with each other. Remove the
humans from the equation.

------
ipsin
Smart replies seem disingenuous. I mean, they're creepy if you know they're
suggestions ("a machine told me to tell you..."), and creepy if you don't ("is
that my friend or my friend's agent?").

I prefer end-to-end encryption to yummy clams.

------
cromwellian
Please don't send me emoji, acronyms, or other abbreviated replies. I demand
you painfully type out a full grammatically correct sentence of original
content on a cramped, painful, non-haptic-feedback mobile keyboard.

~~~
dredmorbius
Obxkcd: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

------
huuu
For me one of the reasons of not having social accounts is privacy. But I also
hate that more and more people are starting to communicate in a virtual way.

This is another example of the emptyness it will give.

------
dmritard96
A bit tangential, but didn't old symbian phones have the ability to learn what
you are likely to say? It feels like this is really pretty derivative but most
have short memories...

~~~
visarga
Even the Swiftkey keyboard does that.

------
nicky0
Greetings card manufacturers have been doing this for us for decades.

------
StanislavPetrov
In a perfect world using the word "smart" in this context would be a clever
use of irony instead of another disheartening example of the vapidity of
modern society.

------
tdkl
In the future our attention will be sold. [1]

~Mark Manson

[1] [http://markmanson.net/attention](http://markmanson.net/attention)

------
musesum
Now I can have that lobotomy I've always wanted

------
callesgg
Id be insulted if people started sending me computer emails instead of
physical mails, i find it to be lazy when they wont even bother to go to the
mailbox.

------
Zikes
Like keyboard predictive text suggestions haven't existed for years already.

------
basicplus2
may as well take your brain out and stick it in a jar.

~~~
dampflames
I'm ready.

------
iopq
Sure thing!

------
redsummer
Yum clams!

------
silliconeheart
google has really shit marketing

------
silliconeheart
Google has really shit marketing.

------
1stop
I chat and am "friends" with a whole bunch of people don't really care about.
If Google cab automate the pretense of a friendship then great, I can spend
more time on my actual friends.

