Google has unveiled its new feature in Inbox by Gmail called 'Smart Reply,' which has the ability to give appropriate responses to your mails.
"Smart Reply suggests up to three responses based on the emails you get. For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing," wrote Bálint Miklós, a Software Engineer of Google, on the Official Gmail Blog. "And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away."
CNET reported that the technology behind the 'Smart Reply' is a complex one called Deep Learning, a newer version of Artificial Intelligence. Deep Learning is being used by Google to screen out spam, identify photo subjects, translate text, and try to spot trends in your spreadsheet data. These give Google Services something of the mental capability and sophistication of a real human mind.
Google Research Blog reported that the 'Smart Reply' prototype has been tested internally and have brought some bizarre responses, like its propensity to respond with "I love you" to seemingly anything.
"As adorable as this sounds, it wasn't really what we were hoping for. Some analysis revealed that the system was doing exactly what we'd trained it to do, generate likely responses -- and it turns out that responses like "Thanks", "Sounds good", and "I love you" [were] super common -- so the system would lean on them as a safe bet if it was unsure," said Greg Corrado, a Senior Research Scientist at Google. "Normalizing the likelihood of a candidate reply by some measure of that response's prior probability, forced the model to predict responses that were not just highly likely, but also had high affinity to the original message. This made for a less lovey, but far more useful, email assistant," added Corrado.
The 'Smart Reply' feature in Inbox by Gmail will be available for Android and iOS later this week.
