Email was supposed to make our lives easier, but instead it has turned into an enormous time consuming effort, with people spending hours every day reading and responding to messages. Gmail, the world’s biggest email service, made this task somewhat easier when Google introduced it in 2004, but, as studies have shown emails still take up around 13 hours per week for people. Now, Google wants to help fix this. The internet giant has unveiled a new feature in their Inbox App called Smart Reply, that provides automatic responses to certain emails.
It looks like Google is putting a different twist on the concept of “automated reply” with a new software-based tool that aims to write artificially intelligent responses to some of your emails. The technology is part of an update to Google’s Inbox app for managing and organizing email. This app called INBOX, is available on both Apple and Android devices.
In this instance, Google says it has created a program that identifies which incoming emails merit quick responses and then figures out the appropriate wording and response. Up to three choices will be offered as a quick reply before it’s sent. So what would of taken several minutes with multiple touches and taps could now take seconds with just one tap. The new feature is available to all consumers who use the free version of their app called Inbox, as well as the more than 2 million businesses who pay for Google’s suite of applications designed for work.
Google expects its new “smart reply” option to be particularly popular when people are checking emails on smartphones equipped with smaller, touch-screen keyboards. The responses that people select are supposed to help Google’s computers learn which ones work best so the software can become more intelligent.
Smartphone software makers have been trying to figure out how to save keystrokes for years. Auto-correct, swipe gestures and even emoji’s are helpful sometimes, but they still require a bunch of taps or swipes to type what you want to say. Quick responses have existed for years, but they’re standard messages and don’t change based on the content of the text or email that you received.
Smart Reply uses what is known as an artificial neural network—an intimidating term for a particular kind of mathematical model—to tease out the patterns and probabilities that underlie e-mail communications.
In other words, by plotting similarities in context, word frequency, and sentence structure, the neural network can teach itself to recognize and group together the endless variety of ways that humans have developed to say much the same thing: “How does this afternoon look for a call?” “Can we talk later today?” Or “Does this P.M. work for a quick chat?” By trawling through the data again, Google’s computers can then find and suggest the most typical responses to this particular thought vector: “Sure, what time were you thinking?” “Sure, anytime.” Or “Sure, what’s up?”
For privacy reasons, the people working at Google are not allowed to read everyone’s e-mail messages. Machines, however, are, and by drawing on that data they can gradually sort sentences into “logical thought vectors,” and begin to learn proper responses to short, simple email messages.
And so for the Gmail user, smart reply will help make those emails that only need a quick response that much faster, saving precious time spent typing and for those emails that require a bit more thought, some people say “it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.”
Engineers at Google are saying that this Smart Reply feature is the latest example of effort to teach machines how to take over some of the simple tasks typically handled by humans. Though, if you look at the bigger picture and dive a little deeper into their automated vehicle and drone initiatives or spent sometime using their voice control features on most of their devices one might tend to agree that they seem to be taking more control of our lives.
Tech News Today – Google Inbox Answers Your Email:
