New Google AI Can Generate Answers for User's Emails

Google has unveiled a new technology designed to reply emails quickly and easy.

The new Google tool is called Smart Reply. It is designed so users can quickly get through their emails on a mobile phone where typing replies, and even dictating them, can be tedious. Smart Reply uses similar AI technology to that recently rolled out in Google search engine, via a system named RankBrain.

Smart Reply, just like RankBrain, uses an approach to convert the words and sentences in the e-mail into mathematical entities (vector) that let it understand and reason about the content of the message. It then figures out what some appropriate responses might be, analyzing real-world email conversations when composing a reply, according to NDTV Gadgets. 

Google has been improving its Inbox by Gmail app so that it can analyze the contents of an email and then suggest a few helpful responses. The general idea of the tool is that users are allowed to quickly respond to someone while on the go, without having to manually tap a fresh message into their smartphone keyboard.

Google software engineer Balint Miklos said that Smart Reply is a two-part ordeal. It scans the content of the e-mail and creates three possible responses. Miklos said that it is a machine learning workflow of “sequence-to-sequence learning.” The system uses “long short-term-memory,” or LSTM, neural network, also similar to human memory, Wired reported. It can “remember” the beginning of an email until the end of it.

The replies it generates are between three and six words long. It can tell when an email includes a joke and suggest the reply “Ha. Very funny.” Other common replies include “Thanks,” “Sounds good,” and “How about tomorrow?”

AI really is reading”user’s email and coming up with what it judges the most appropriate original response in the context of a specific message. According Google product management director Alex Gawley, the system can generate about 20,000 discrete responses.