An so it begins... To anyone who has read Daemon by Daniel Suarez this sounds very creepy.
Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
111–120 of 200 posts
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#112Oh god this is even worse
https://gizmodo.com/uhh-google-assistant-impersonating-a-hum...
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add a third, I have a problem with my personal emails being used as a corpus of text to train these models. Maybe they're using only my emails to train a model for me, and turning that feature off disables them doing so. Maybe they're using everyone's email to train a generic model. Of course, they've been (machine) reading your emails to provide ads since forever, so in that sense maybe this isn't really that new…
We're training Smart Compose from highly anonymized global corpus of consumer email. We've stopped using emails for Ad targeting entirely, and the enforcement is quite strict, as reported in June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/23/technology/gmail-ads.html
You don't have an email in your profile, so I'm just gonna hijack this comment. :)
I can't enable smart compose. My general tab doesn't have "Enable experiments" at the bottom. Is this getting rolled out in phases?
I logged out and logged back in just in case, but no dice.
My email is in my profile if you need it. Thanks!
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh no, more autocomplete! I don't see it as much scarier than tab-completion while programming or on a phone. As long as you're watching over it and fixing mistakes, it's just a convenience.
If it wrote the entire email for you, and you watched it to see there were no mistakes, I suppose that would just be a convenience too. But at some point you cross a line and your voice is lost. That line draws closer, inch by inch.
At that point it shades into ghostwriting, which can be done well or badly. If done well, it should be imitating how you'd write it yourself.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#115Side note: How is this blog design by Google considered "good"? Between the dropdown from the top when you scroll and the stickied footer, about a 1/3 of the page is easily readable (shoved into about 500px). I'm not a designer. But this stuff is bad. How is this greenlit at Google?
Screenshot for reference: https://imgur.com/a/NMEOBgb
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#116Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#117Okay, I guess I've got the contrarian take this time around. As a CEO/founder, I spend an astonishing amount of time writing emails that are mostly the same. Things like the following:
Dear [name],
[pleasantry].
I'm writing to check in on [$$non-automatable follow-up action$$]. [Have you been able to take care of this yet? Let me know if I can be of assistance.]
[best regards / thanks]
[signature]
...
For me, things like Gmail's one/two-sentence responses on mobile are _honestly_ a godsend. Things like Smart Compose are similarly incredibly valuable. I'm not trying to be the world's best orator, I'm just trying to bang off the dozens of emails I need to get taken care of each day as quickly as possible.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#118I'm the PM for this and the author of the article. Happy to answer any questions, with the exception that I can't comment on future roadmap.
Hi, thanks for offering to answer questions. Did you consider the language homogenisation question and if so, how did you answer it?
It's a great question and one of my early concerns as well.
For most people email is a utility. The diversity of language in the middle chunk of the distribution isn't very high today and the biggest complaint most people have about email is how much time it takes. Most of our users aren't writing poetry, they are doing every day business transactions and we can help them be much more productive. Think how many times you've written "hope to hear from you soon", or some equivalent.
For the tails of the distribution Smart Compose is not helpful. We address this primarily with a triggering model, we aim to only show suggestions when we're quite confident that you're in the 'just getting things done' mode.
And if you're the type of person who always has a lot of personality in your emails, the feature probably isn't a great fit for you. Today it's opt-in, and there will always be a setting even if we turn it on by default.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#119This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
This is happening everywhere. We're being made more and more homogeneous. The same applies to other aspects of our life, e.g. music, films etc. The general rule is what is popular is safer, so it's being promoted more. In this case what is less popular is not even given a chance to surface - no matter if it's popular radio or YouTube recommendations.
Local musical scenes used to have their own sounds, but thier influence has fallen away to more distant influences. If we all listened to POP top 20, then this would have homogenized music. Instead, there is much more variety and musical subcultures than ever before.
Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail
#120This is basically autocorrect on the level of phrases. If that's true, this will have an enormously homogenizing effect on the way we speak (spell check alone has caused an actual shrinkage of the English lexicon [1]). I wrote extensively about this for Mondo 2000: ( http://www.mondo2000.com/2018/01/17/pink-lexical-goop-dark-s... ) [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00313#references
I think the trend will lead to illiteracy. Why learn to read and write when your computer can just speak to you and transcribe everything you say to it? I recently saw a signature board for honor students posted at a high school. The signatures from the early 1990s were all in cursive and every signature had its own style. The signatures from 2017 were mostly printed in block letters and looked like something a first…
I don't think lack of handwriting skill has anything to do with writing ability, which is generally understood to be the ability to express ideas in text. Of course keyboard skills have supplanted handwriting. Perhaps dictation will replace keyboard skills soon. The method of written creation is irrelevant to the output.