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Let Smart Reply answer that email for you — it's already doing it quite a bit

Image used with permission by copyright holder
Did that last email from your friend about this weekend’s plans sound suspiciously canned? Hate to break it to you, but that might’ve been because … it was. A little over a year after Google debuted its Inbox app, the internet giant has revealed that its Smart Reply feature is responsible for an impressive 10 percent of mobile responses sent in the app.Smart Reply, as its name implies, generates replies to incoming messages based on its contents, using artificial intelligence to send back a response so you don’t have to. And apparently, one out of every 10 messages are now being sent not by humans, but by the AI. This latest statistic was brought to light by Jeff Dean, a senior fellow in Google’s research group, at Wednesday’s AI Frontier conference in Santa Clara, California.

“What this does is it takes an incoming email message and then, given the text of the email message, it tries to predict what are likely responses you might want to give,” Dean said. “Now, 10 percent of mobile responses on email on the Inbox product are generated with this Smart Reply feature, so it’s saving people a lot of time.”

Of course, while 10 percent is a significant proportion, it’s unclear how many emails this actually translates to. After all, the Inbox app is not as popular as the Gmail app (though it does consistently find itself in the top 5o productivity apps in the App Store, and seems relatively popular on Android, too).

Lulu Chang
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Fascinated by the effects of technology on human interaction, Lulu believes that if her parents can use your new app…
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