Today, on stage at Google I/O 2018, Sundar Pichai announced that Gmail would be receiving a new feature called Smart Compose. The new tool uses machine learning to start suggesting phrases as you type. As you type out your emails you’ll see ghost text suggestions which you can accept simply by hitting tab; once pressed it sends you to the end of the suggested text so you can continue to type.
In the example shown on stage, Taco Tuesday was entered as the email subject which the machine learning took notice of to produce more refined suggestions. Another highlighted feature of Smart Compose is its ability to enter the “mundane” details such as addresses; this will save time if you’re ever arranging meetups.
Sundar didn’t have much else to say about the new Smart Compose feature other than it will be rolling out to users later this month. It’s worth noting that while it was shown on the web version of Gmail, it’s not clear if it will come to mobile, and if it does, how they’ll make it convenient to use with the lack of a tab key.
The development team must have been very busy in the last year, aside from Smart Complete, Gmail received a big update at the end of April.
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