Too tired to reply to emails? Don’t worry, Google will do it

If you are someone who gets hundreds of emails everyday and find it a problem typing out replies on your smartphone, help is at hand.

Google is launching a new feature that will predict the possible replies to an email and the user has to only select one of the options. Called Smart Reply, the automated application will read the content of your email and offer three basic responses at the bottom of the screen for a quick response.

For example, if you receive an email from your boss asking for a document, Smart Reply will show three options at the bottom of the phone screen – “ I don’t have it”, “I’ll have to look for it” or “I’ll send it to you”. The user has to pick one of the options and hit the send button, saving time.

The application learns from the usage pattern of each user and predicts answers based on previous replies. It will work only with Google Inbox.

“When you're checking email on the go, it can be cumbersome and time-consuming to reply to all or even some of them. What if there was a way for your inbox to guess which emails can be answered with a short reply, prepare a few responses on your behalf and present them to you, one tap away? Well, starting later this week, Inbox will do just that with Smart Reply,” Google said in a blogpost.

Inbox uses machine learning to recognise emails that need responses and to generate the natural language responses on the fly.

The Smart Reply System is built on a pair of recurrent neural networks, one used to encode the incoming email and one to predict possible responses.

The encoding network consumes the words of the incoming email one at a time, and produces a vector (a list of numbers). This vector captures the gist of what is being said without getting hung up on diction — for example, the vector for “Are you free tomorrow?” should be similar to the vector for “Does tomorrow work for you?” The second network starts from this thought vector and synthesises a grammatically correct reply one word at a time, like it’s typing it out. 

Smart Reply will be rolling out later this week on both Google Play and the App Store in English.