Gmail’s Smart Reply Is Part of Me Now

And I think I’m OK with it

Sometime last year, Gmail introduced the Smart Reply. That’s the feature that lets you respond to an email on your phone in one tap. For example, you get an email that reads,“Hey, Andrew! Thanks for agreeing to come to Kayla’s third birthday! Can you please bring potato salad? Don’t forget the theme is pirates. Arrrgh, me hearties!”

If you’re using the Gmail app on your phone, you will be given three automated-response options. I tried this by emailing a second Gmail account Kayla’s party request. These were my one-touch choices: “Will do!”, “Sure thing!” or “Sorry, I can’t make it.”

Interestingly, someone else receiving the exact same email will be given three different responses to choose from, with nuanced differences in the “voice,” such as a slightly less enthusiastic “I’ll be there,” “I’ll try” and “Let me check.”

This is because Smart Reply builds the answers through an algorithm based on all your previous Gmail correspondence. The app scans your entire email history to attempt a good guess at how you would respond to a potato-salad pirate-party request.

So if somebody had asked me for a potato salad sometime in 2007 and I’d replied, “Shove your potatoes up your arse, Gavin,” that option could have popped up today. Possibly.

The Smart Reply claims, through machine learning, to capture diverse situations, writing styles and tones unique to each user. It even picks up on my weird transatlantic vocabulary, on different occasions offering me both “Awesome!” and “Terrific!”

After tapping your chosen reply, the person receiving your response—maybe Kayla’s mom—has no way of knowing that it wasn’t “you” who wrote the reply. You’re essentially being covertly impersonated by the machine.

The enthusiasm in the “voice” created for me was pretty accurate—I do use too many exclamation marks. After sending my apologies in one click, I then discovered that a Smart Reply can be responded to with another Smart Reply.