Google announced a new Gmail feature Tuesday called Smart Compose that will use artificial intelligence to help users write emails.
Smart Compose will suggest complete sentences once a user starts an email—everything from the greeting to the closing, and common phrases in between. If a suggestion pops up that users like, they just hit the tab button to use it.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated the new feature while on stage at the Google I/O Developer Conference, showing how the AI picks up on the subject line “taco Tuesday” to help create phrases.
Smart Compose will appear in the next few weeks to customers who opted for the refreshed version of Gmail. It will be made available for G Suite customers in the workplace in the coming months. Users must enable the new Gmail by going to Settings > “Try the new Gmail.” From here, they go to the general tab in settings, scroll down and enable “experimental access.”
Smart Compose is a relatively minor in the flood of announcements coming out of the Google I/O developer conference Tuesday. But it illustrates Google’s larger investment in AI and its effort to show to wary consumers of its benefits.
