Google's Smart Reply

By Adam  |  15 Nov 2015 12:00:00

Almost everybody on the internet will receive a large number of emails; the more places you sign up to, the more people who gain access to your email address. Of course, many of these emails will be spam and won't require any kind of reply, but if you're quite active on the internet, you're likely to have ones which will require a proper written response. Nobody knows the feeling of lots of emails more than eCommerce business owners and replying to emails might actually take up a significant portion of your time. But Google, ever the innovators, want to help lessen that burden with a little something called Smart Reply.

Smart Reply is the new software that Google has been working on and the idea behind it is that it will reply to your emails for you; it's been programmed to read messages and to respond to them in a way which sounds as natural as possible. It doesn't actually send the emails for you, you have to approve it (and can make edits) before pressing send, but this is still something that will save people time. In some ways, this feels like a natural evolution of auto-responses for emails and it will doubtlessly come in handy for times when people are away from work. Of course, there's no guarantee that Smart Reply will ever have the ability to actually send emails, but as artificial intelligence increases, who knows what the future holds?

So I thought that might be an interesting piece of news for all of you in the eCommerce world. At the moment, it may seem doubtful that Smart Reply will be able to produce many sendable emails, but it might be a great timesaver when it comes to emails which only need a minimal response. It's exciting to think about how this will develop in the future. Maybe a time will come when people struggle to imagine life without it!