How ‘smart’ email could change the way we talk

Keyboard (Credit: Alamy) Start typing a reply in Google’s Gmail and it might feel like it is reading your mind. Tap out the letters “tha” and up pops the rest of a sentence in greyed out letters. Press tab and your sentence completes itself. In simpler times, you would need to go to the hassle of using valuable seconds to type out “thank you very much” or “that sounds great” all by yourself. But now, email systems like Gmail can finish sentences for you . This feature is powered by a form of artificial intelligence known as natural language processing, which aims to understand and use language in ways that are more human-like than computers have managed before. You might also like: • Is autocorrect making you boring • The signs of disease no one can see • The words that make you human But while it can help to reduce the amount of time spent composing an email, many people have mixed feelings about the autocomplete feature, known as Smart Compose , with some describing its ability to scan our messages and come up with a suitable response as downright “creepy” . With machines starting to take over some of the art of composing messages to our colleagues, friends and loved ones, does this also risk robbing us of something more important? Are they sucking away our individuality and the joy of human interaction? And could these autocomplete technologies even be changing the way our brains work? Google’s Gmail is one of the first major email providers to use AI to predict what users might want to say in a response to a message (Credit: Getty Images) “Prediction is fundamental to our perception and our relation with the world,” says Maria Geffen, who studies neuronal circuits for auditory […]

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