A lot of mind-blowing features were announced at Google I/O. The Google Assistant making calls on your behalf still reigns as king, but Gmail’s new Smart Compose feature was pretty impressive too. Smart Compose is essentially Smart Replies on steroids, as it is capable of composing entire emails for you, using Google’s machine learning sorcery. It predicts what you’re going to type and fills it in with a press of the tab key. Google stated that the feature would be rolling out ‘soon’, and it looks like it’s already live, albeit as an experimental feature.
Works only on the new redesign of Gmail
For now, it’s only available on the desktop version of the new Gmail, and to use it, you’ll have to enable experimental features in Gmail’s settings. To try Smart Compose, tick the box that says “Enable experimental access” in the General tab of Gmail’s settings. Do note that it only appears in the redesigned version of Gmail and you may have to toggle between versions a few times to get it working. Once enabled, a Smart Compose option will appear with a little sign denoting that it’s experimental, and it’ll be on by default.
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Every time you compose an email, there is prompt to press tab a few times, enabling Smart Compose to do its thing. After that, the suggestions are shown as lighter text, which often ends up unhelpful, and you end up typing everything out yourself most of the time. The version we saw at Google I/O was a glimpse at how it will be once it’s finished. It’ll be a while before that happens, considering that it’s still in early phases of development. Do we really need AI drafting emails and making phone calls for us? Probably not. Is the fact that AI can draft emails and make phone calls on our behalf awesome? Absolutely. Will Gmail automatically shoot off an ‘I won’t be able to make it to the office today because I’m feeling unwell’ email to your boss when your phone detects higher than normal body temperature? Only time will tell.
