Google has provided a solution for people who have no time in responding to their emails.
Introducing Smart Reply for Android and iOS, Google unveils the system as a way for users to quickly reply to emails by giving them three suggestions of possible responses.
According to the post in Google Research Blog by Google's Senior Research Scientist Greg Corrado, Smart Reply has two artificial neural networks which are used to encode the emails received and suggest possible responses for the encoded message.
The encoding network operates by analyzing the email "word by word" and producing a set of numbers called "thought vectors" which gives the general idea of the message.
Meanwhile, the other network examines the "thought vector" and creates well-formed short responses.
"One challenge of working with emails is that the inputs and outputs of the model can be hundreds of words long. This is where the particular choice of recurrent neural network type really matters. We used a variant of a "long short-term-memory" network which is particularly good at preserving long-term dependencies, and can home in on the part of the incoming email that is most useful in predicting a response, without being distracted by less relevant sentences before and after," Corrado said in the post.
On the other hand, as cited by Nicola Twilley in her report in The New Yorker, due to the fact that machines can read all the email messages in Google, the system is capable of sorting sentences and recognizing "similarities in context, word frequency, and word structure" which allows it to form fitting responses based for the email message.
The report also mentioned that the Smart Reply system is programmed to suggest short responses with only five to six words. Although it pointed that it is capable of offering longer responses, it was deemed to be no longer natural and people might prefer to type the reply themselves.
"The longer the answer got, the more the end user felt that it was important that it was in their tone. It's fine to sound generic for six words, but by ten it gets uncomfortable," Alex Gawley, Product Manager for Gmail, told The New Yorker.
Moreover, even though some might feel that Smart Reply is invading their privacy as it learns their habit of responses by reading their previous messages, Corrado emphasized that it was the system -- a machine -- that is doing all the work and no human is reading their email.
The system will be available on Inbox for Android and iOS.
What do you think about Google's Smart Reply? Will it make emailing easier for you? Let us know in the comments below.