In October 2018, Gmail proudly announced that Smart Compose “ saves people from typing over 1 characters each week.” In June 2019, this number doubled, and the “savings” were publicized on Twitter and in Sundar Pichai’s - Google’s Chief Executive Officer’s - letter to shareholders.īut while Smart Compose users rave about its accuracy and Gmail promotes its time-saving superpowers, there’s a paradox to consider. The 2018 blog post that introduced the feature emphasized how time-consuming it can be to write email and, therefore, how welcome a tool to speed up the task. Email efficiencyĪccording to Google, Smart Compose is intended to save time. Its uncanniness stems from what the AI suggests we, as email users and writers, might be willing to ghost.
Trained on billions of data points ( including yours, probably), Smart Compose’s purpose is to predict words as you type, to “ help you write emails even faster while you’re on the go.”īut if there’s something truly unnerving about the spectral Smart Compose, it’s not its eerily good predictive accuracy. This is Smart Compose, the word-prediction feature leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) that Gmail launched in 2018.
