Gmail’s Inbox app can now respond to emails for you, automatically. This new feature is called “Smart Reply” and it is suppose to automatically suggest short responses to messages where a lengthy reply may not be necessary. Smart Reply will suggest up to three responses based on the incoming email, and allow you to quickly respond with a single tap. Smart reply will do all the thinking for you and guess which emails can be answered with a short reply, and if short response is not possible because the email needs to be more personal, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.
Smart Reply will learn how you reply over time in order to offer better suggestions and it is due to hit both the Android and iOS versions this week, and you will be able to try for yourself.
It seems like Smart Reply will improve based on the initial feedback they obtain, Google says: There’s actually a lot going on behind the scenes to make Smart Reply work. Inbox uses machine learning to recognise emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly. If you’re interested in how Smart Reply works, including how researchers got machine learning to work on a data set that they never saw, you can read more about it on the Google Research Blog.