Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail • Hacker News Board

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#141

Post by thaumaturgy » Tue, May 08, 2018, 9:42 PM UTC

dmazin wrote: post #33

This 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

From the paper you cited:

> In our analysis we treat words with equivalent meanings but with different spellings (e.g. color versus colour) as distinct words...

I think it's a bit of a stretch to use that to say that English lexicon is shrinking. The number of different spellings for the same words is, yes, but that's not necessarily bad. Other articles suggest that English vocabulary is still steadily growing: https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2016/fe...

I think you made good points regarding QuickType though.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#142

Post by ch4s3 » Tue, May 08, 2018, 9:43 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #132

freeone3000 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think it's irrelevant. Composing text deliberately by hand forces a more measured pace of thought and development of ideas. I've even heard educators say that it's not worth teaching arithmetic anymore because everyone has a computer, or a phone with a calculator. But if you don't grasp the concepts of addition and multiplication that are developed by actually doing it over and over you're never going to be a…

With all due respect, you sound like Homer bemoaning the advent of writing and it's effect on memory.

> Composing text deliberately by hand forces a more measured pace of thought and development of ideas

Penmanship is orthogonal to the ability to write by hand. I for example have atrocious hand writing and can still easily write my thoughts down, and often do. Other's will have trouble with my written notes, but they're not meant for external consumption, I type for that purpose. Cursive versus print style writing are mostly interchangeable for writing down ideas, and learning to write well in cursive takes up to a few years. It may not be time well spent.

> I've even heard educators say that it's not worth teaching arithmetic anymore because everyone has a computer, or a phone with a calculator.

I know a number of teachers, and try to follow trends in US education, and I've never encountered this idea. Are you sure you aren't constructing a straw man here?

> Spelling is also not given much importance these days, with "creative" spelling being acceptable at least through the elementary grades. Even in high school it isn't given a lot of weight.

At least in the US, this is not the case. Any state that uses the Common Core follows these [1] standards, including phonics, building words from stems, and differentiation of homophones.

>If you don't learn the meaning of words

Who's saying anything about this? This tech looks like it just guesses at the banal pleasantries you type at friends and colleagues 1000s of times per year. I know I write the same phrases almost to exhaustion, I'd love to autocomplete the trivial stuff, and spare my hands an wrists. *note there's a great accessibility story here, where people with manual impairments will be able to answer emails more easily.

> Students are losing the ability to think.

Are they really? I'm not sure there's any evidence of this actually happening.

> More and more we are having our worldview formed not by critical thinking and development of our own opinions, but by what Google and other big media companies tell us.

How is this any different than mass media dissemination of information from the previous generation, when everyone watched the same 4 TV channels and read the same 1 or 2 newspapers.

[1]https://www.spelling-words-well.com/common-core-standards.ht...

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#143

Post by stfwn » Tue, May 08, 2018, 10:05 PM UTC

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #63

dmazin wrote: post #33

This 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.

Globalised phenomena (Cola, Marvel, McDonald’s) can have localized meanings (trashy/hyped/cool/classy/masculine/feminine). It’s not an either/or thing. In sociology this is dubbed glocalization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glocalization

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#144

Post by typomatic » Tue, May 08, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #67

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay for FastMail. Voted with my wallet two years ago. If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google.

>If I get any impression someone is writing me messages with this feature, I'll filter them into my trash. I want to speak to people, not Google. This seems like an extreme overreaction and quite antisocial.

Sending me robot-generated messages is quite antisocial!

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#145

Post by mike_ivanov » Tue, May 08, 2018, 10:21 PM UTC

wahern wrote: post #134

mike_ivanov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> being made more and more homogeneous. It might be the way around. This kind of intellectual homogenization might indicate an emergent entity coming to being - some kind of (new?) societal organism, sort of like national state, but I don't know what it actually is this time. We might never learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

No, it's on a different scale. I'm talking about things like an anthill or a tuna shoal kind of emergence -- a collective animal.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#146

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, May 08, 2018, 10:39 PM UTC

peatmoss wrote: post #72

dmazin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two big problems. One, AI mediation of language sees issues like bias amplification (AI learns our biases then suggests them back to us). Google itself wrote about this recently [1]. Two, spell check has a homogenizing effect on spelling [2]. If you extend this to the level of phrases, that will homogenize not just spelling but the very way we talk. [1] https://developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/text-embedding-mod...…

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…

Don't use Gmail if you don't want Google reading your mail?

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#147

Post by mbanerjeepalmer » Tue, May 08, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

prlambert wrote: post #118

mbanerjeepalmer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Okay interesting. Did you get stats on how diverse the majority of users' language is?

I think there's also a second aspect. If I understand correctly, you're referring to the homogenisation of a single user's language (where 'Hope to hear from you soon' loses variation). I think the second aspect is homogenisation of language across many people. Did you look at tailoring the suggestions? In England there must be 30 ways to say goodbye, and this slang arguably is part of regional identity (although I don't know how much made it across to email).

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#148

Post by nathancahill » Tue, May 08, 2018, 11:23 PM UTC

I wrote a tool that helps you do this anywhere by using Google's autocomplete API: https://github.com/nathancahill/Anycomplete

It also supports DuckDuckGo, so for the privacy conscious it should work fine.

Unlike the complaint that Google's product shrinks the lexicon, Anycomplete actually expands your lexicon by allowing you to type words/phrases you have an idea of but don't know how to spell.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#149

Post by meeton » Tue, May 08, 2018, 11:25 PM UTC

People are saying this is 'basically the same as autocorrect or predictive text'. It's not. Autocorrect doesn't make any creative decisions for you, whereas this does.

That is to say: we think at the level of words, not letter-by-letter. When I make a typo, autocorrect corrects what my hands do to match what my brain is thinking. My brain still has primacy. This thing sits at the level of words and even sentences: if it's autocorrect, it's working to correct what my brain is thinking. Which is creepy and sad.

It's a little bit more like predictive text I admit. But because predictive text only suggests one word at a time, there's little semantic meaning to a suggestion and it's rare that I have my thoughts distracted or changed because of it. It's still largely a convenience tool. Suggesting a full sentence is shaping the direction of your thought, which is very different.

I'm still horrified that Google has put this out.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#150

Post by gone35 » Tue, May 08, 2018, 11:28 PM UTC

prlambert wrote: post #101

peatmoss wrote: post #72

Earlier 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

[H]ighly anonymized global corpus of consumer email.

What do you mean by "highly anonymized"? What specific privacy notion are you using, and what is the (demonstrably unavoidable) tradeoff you are de facto threading between utility and privacy?