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]).<p>I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: (<a href="http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-side-autocorrect/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s...</a>)<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references</a>
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.<p>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.
So why exactly are people suddenly up in arms about this?<p>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?<p>Never seen such atrociously negative comments to what's essentially a cool feature you can disable.<p>PS: How many of the outraged people here are actually voting with their wallet and paying for something like Fastmail? (<a href="https://www.fastmail.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.fastmail.com</a>)
Good lord that's scary. Rapidly ushering in the future where none of our words are our own.<p>Anyone ever read Roald Dahl's short story <i>The Great Automatic Grammatizator</i> ? 10/10 strongly recommend, about an engineer who develops a computer-like machine able to compose fiction.<p>Googling "the great automatic grammatizator pdf" gives a .doc version as the top result, for me anyway.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I'm still horrified that Google has put this out.
These types of tools worry me, because I put a lot of value in organic spontaneous conversation.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>This is what you will lose in your conversations, just like it has been lost in search.
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.
Side note:<p>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).<p>I'm not a designer. But this stuff is bad. How is this greenlit at Google?
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.
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:<p>Dear [name],<p>[pleasantry].<p>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.]<p>[best regards / thanks]<p>[signature]<p>...<p>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.
Does this kill EasyMail (YC W18) ??<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16577650</a>
Aha, by training a machine learning algorithm on everybody else's emails, you can now write what everybody else wrote.<p>It's a new generation of Clippy! I'VE GOT THIS, THANKS!
"I apologize for such an algorithmically-generated letter letter - I didn't have time to write a non-algorithmically-generated one."<p>― Mark Twain's Gmail
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?
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.<p>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.
I wonder where the training data comes from? Is it from my account only, my organization account, or...?<p>If I type “Sure, the password is” will it auto suggest some passwords from other people’s previously sent emails?
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?
I wrote a tool that helps you do this anywhere by using Google's autocomplete API: <a href="https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete</a><p>It also supports DuckDuckGo, so for the privacy conscious it should work fine.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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’<p>PS: I’m loving the idea and let’s hope it can get tailored to ones individual needs
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?<p>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.<p>[0]: <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html" rel="nofollow">https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html</a>
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.
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.
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?<p>I think if something like that was implemented this could be a cool way to introduce people to new and different writing patterns.
Why do I want this?<p>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.
I was happy to open the comments and see everyone writing approximately what I was thinking.<p>Almost made me feel there would be no point writing something similar myself.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.<p>Weird to roll out to free consumers first. What's the reasoning behind this?
I think Google creating reincarnation of MSFT's clippy - solution looking for problem.<p>These "intelligent" hints of what someone think I likely want to express - quickly becoming a distracting nuisance.<p>Hopefully it'll be optional feature.
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.
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.
Oh god this is even worse
<a href="https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-human-is-scary-as-1825861987" rel="nofollow">https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-hum...</a>