Email Autocomplete Is Sucking the Life Out of Communication
The new services turn email into bloodless business speak. So why are we allowing Silicon Valley to dictate what we say?
If you’ve used Gmail any time recently, you’ll probably be familiar with Smart Reply and Smart Compose. Smart Reply is simple. Whenever you receive an email, three jaunty and heavily exclamation-pointed options pop up under its body: things like “Thank you!”or “That sounds great!” or “That works for me!” Click the option you like the best, edit (or don’t), and press send. Congratulations: an email that would have taken you 30 seconds to write has taken you two.
Smart Compose, on the other hand, helps you craft emails yourself. Up pops grayish text when you start to write an email, suggesting how you might like to end your sentence. You start writing “That sounds…” and “good to me!” appears. Like Smart Reply, it makes writing emails easier, faster, and far less mentally taxing.
When Google rolled out Smart Compose for business customers last year, the company said the feature would “fill in common phrases and relevant addresses,” though the technology is ultimately supposed to write in a user’s voice. It’s still a work in progress: in April, Google said Smart Compose was “becoming more tailored…
