Gmail Smart Reply To Debut This Week

Google on Tuesday announced “Smart Reply” feature – a deep neural network that writes email, for Gmail Inbox.

The company explained that Smart Reply will suggest up to three responses based on the emails a person gets on Gmail. The feature will help in saving time considerably by “thinking” and even “typing” responses to emails requiring quicker reply, while for the emails that need a bit more thought, it will give a jump start for faster response.

A user just needs to tap on one of the suggested responses to start editing and if it is good to send as is, just one more tap will send the email reply, The Wall Street Journal explained.

“Smart Reply feature is still in a pretty nascent state with responses limited to three to six words that you can then edit and send”, Gizmodo said.

The blog post further explains that Inbox uses machine learning to identify emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses.

“Much like how Inbox gets better when you report spam, the responses you choose (or don't choose!) help improve future suggestions”, it added.

According to the Google Research Blog, the Smart Reply System is built on a pair of “recurrent neural networks” – one used to encode the incoming email and other to predict possible responses.

The feature will be rolled out on Inbox for Android and iOS later this week.