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Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

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Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#81

Post by njarboe »

peatmoss wrote: post #75
dmazin wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, I forgot where I read this, but I believe all Gmails are eligible for the model. Again, forgot where I saw this, but Google takes great precaution to protect your data from human inspection, but being used in the corpus is fair game.

I think if you are a (paid?) enterprise user, they do not do this. On the other hand, sussing out what is and is not fair game is quite a lot easier with a service such as Fastmail.

I don't think this is true. When our large university switched to gmail, all I could find was that they said they would not use our emails for targeting advertising. Seems like that leaves a lot of other possibilities like profile creation (they just won't use it to target ad at you), machine learning of all types, cross correlation with my personal email for who knows what, etc.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#82

Post by microtonal »

Bukhmanizer wrote: post #51
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

Holy crap, everybody burn you're dictionaries.

Google Mail would suggest: Holy crap, everybody burn your dictionaries.

;)

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#83

Post by mycorrhizal »

Since many commenters seem to be concerned about the possibility of this homogenizing written communication. What if this system implemented something similar to an epsilon-greedy strategy where say 5% of the time it actually recommended a phrase outside of ordinary writing patterns, but was still grammatically correct and semantically the same?

I think if something like that was implemented this could be a cool way to introduce people to new and different writing patterns.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#84

Post by tysonzni »

In the new equilibrium of people sending lots of automated emails, how would the receiver of an email distinguish between a canned response and a real response? I suspect the incentive to properly signal your email as real can reduce adoption of "Smart Compose" for non-trivial communication. So that leaves us with use cases like scheduling meetings, quick updates or alerts - most of which are already automated in some extent through notification and logging.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#85

Post by ljm »

dmazin wrote: post #60
Bukhmanizer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy crap, everybody burn you're dictionaries.

The interesting thing is that autocorrect tries to fix many alternate spellings actually included by dictionaries (e.g. "judgement").

I find that even when I set my country to UK and my language settings say 'British English', I'm still getting various autocorrections to US English to the point where I'm maintaining a list of dictionary overrides for words that us Brits spell differently (or have a distinction for), and there are plenty of words that it claims don't exist when a cursory dictionary search elsewhere proves otherwise.

It's mostly manageable on a laptop because it's easy to go back and edit text and make your computer behave. On a phone it's ducking^Wducking^Wfucking infuriating because you can automatically get the same correction a good two or three times before you can get the word you want, and you are very actively fighting a tool that is trying too hard to help, to the point it will deliberately misinterpret your keypress if it thinks it has a better idea of what you wanted to type.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#86

Post by z0r »

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.

I'm not sure how true your observation really is, but I sympathize with the sentiment. My personal fear is a future where the only freedoms left are to work and consume.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#88

Post by z0r »

meeton wrote: post #10

This is awful. We need _less_ mediation and commodification of our personal interactions, not more. What is the use of this? At best this is a solution searching for a problem, at worst it's an attempt to standardize our communication in a way which makes semantic meaning easier to analyse.

When the majority of written communications are composed from a few selected branches, the potential storage and transmission savings are huge!

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#89

Post by leepowers »

joelrunyon wrote: post #76

Side 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?

You're right the related articles stickied at the bottom is super-distracting, it draws the eye, and has to be dealt with before you can continue reading. It's an interruption plain an simple - not as bad as a layered modal - but it still introduces an element of work to the reading experience.

The really frustrating thing is it's for related articles and it's shown first thing on the page. How about giving me a god damn minute to read the article I clicked on before prompting me to read something else. Related articles are fine. But how about putting them at the bottom of the page? I guess this is an interface a team of geniuses creates when they optimize for engagement instead of content.

This is definitely an anti-pattern.

Re: Write Emails Faster with Smart Compose in Gmail

#90

Post by pasbesoin »

smnrchrds wrote: post #16

I don't think a native English speaker would benefit much from this feature. But as someone for whom English is a second language, I am sure that I would have appreciated this when I was less fluent in English. I am now trying to learn French, and I find myself searching to the most trivial sentences in linguee.fr. Learning grammar and vocabulary is one thing; knowing the idiomatic way to express one's message is an…

This is why I've taken to watching a lot of TV in languages I'm interested in. Challenges with such:

1. A program I'm actually interested in and with which I can engage. And access to same.

2. Differences between: Spoken and written language. Dialect versus "standard usage".

3. Passive as opposed to active participation. (Also, I seem to have forgotten my original point 3.)

Even when I'm not entirely certain, what I've gained through this gives me a starting point in having an idea of what the/a proper idiom may be, which I can then take to the Web if I need further research/verification.

I wish I'd had access to such resources when I was learning my first languages. Instead, I was largely limited to the classroom and the professor for such exposure. (In most of the U.S., and with other than Spanish and perhaps family and friends, foreign languages are -- were, certainly, a generation ago -- "far away".)

And music. I happened across some that I enjoyed. If nothing else, this helped give me more sense of the sound of the language.

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