On the first day of its Google I/O annual developers conference, Google announced a smart new feature for Gmail, which will type out emails for you.

Called Smart Compose, the feature is essentially an extension of the Smart Reply feature, the only difference being that now it will assist you with composing emails. As demonstrated at the Google I/O 2018, the feature will suggest complete sentences within the body of the mail, while you are composing one.

The Smart Compose feature is expected to constantly operate in the background and will work on the same principle as word suggestions in a virtual keyboard on iOS or Android. Smart Compose will suggest sentences depending on what your first few words are. If you want to go with the suggestion, you can hit tab to select it, and the text will auto-populate. Otherwise, you can ignore and continue to type as usual.

Along with saving a lot of time taken in composing a mail, the feature will potentially also save you from sending mails with grammatical errors or typos, which can be quite embarrassing.

The feature also understands context.

For instance, you are typing out a mail on Friday, then it will suggest you to end the mail with “Have a good weekend”.

Google has said that the Smart Compose feature will start to appear for users over the coming weeks, and will be integrated for G Suite users in the next few months.

However, in order to receive the features, you will have to ensure that you are using the new Gmail. Doing that is pretty simple. Head to the web application of your Gmail account, click the gear icon in the top right corner. If the update is available on your account, you will see an option to “Try the new Gmail” up top. Selecting it will activate the new Gmail user interface.

Just in case you have not received the update, you can keep checking back. Google has not made the new Gmail default for everyone yet. But the rollout is supposed to be global for all the 1.4 billion Gmail users.


Updated Date: May 09, 2018 10:26 AM