Google created Inbox as an innovative but kind of experimental way to organize all your emails from Gmail and other relevant information such as calendar events. At first, users had to get invited to try this new app, but it is now available on Android and iOS devices as well as several browsers in the desktop such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari. The app has been updated a few times adding new features including the ability to snooze emails and events, new widgets and even the “undo send” feature that is now available in Gmail. Yesterday, we found out about a new feature that would make replying much easier.
The new feature is called Smart Reply and it basically “reads” the text on your screen and provides a few automatically generated short answers to choose from. Of course, this feature would get better over time, as there has to be some machine learning and the more you use it, the better it will get used to the kind of language you speak and possibly use certain words or phrases with some of your contacts. Perhaps it will even be able to sense the tone of the message or understand certain situations and reply accordingly. As you might imagine, the algorithm is quite complex as it needs to analyze several variables and then form a grammatically correct sentence with options including an affirmative or negative phrase or maybe a question while keeping a natural language.
It was said that this functionality would be available later this week, and apparently it will be available a little sooner than expected. The Inbox team communicated this on their official Twitter account “To all those asking, Smart Reply will start rolling out to Inbox on Android and iOS tomorrow”. So for those anxious to start using this feature, you might start checking for an update on Google Play or the App Store very soon. Let’s remember that this feature is only available in English for now, but if everything goes well, we might start getting updates for additional languages. They might even make the algorithm work with multiple languages within a message.