Gmail’s new “smart compose” feature will help you write emails faster

At today’s I/O keynote, Google announced a new Gmail feature dubbed “smart compose.” This AI-based system will let Gmail users write messages faster by suggesting phrases as they type out emails.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai presented a short demo of the new feature, showing how the AI suggests words and phrases and even completes sentences as you type out messages in a new email window.

Smart compose will suggest options for what you may want to say next based on what you’ve already typed. If it works as well as it did in the demo, smart compose should help Gmail users write emails much faster and more efficiently.

We’ve seen features similar to “smart compose” in other contexts, like smartphone messaging apps. However, those apps typically stop at suggesting words and short phrases—Google’s new AI feature for Gmail goes even further to suggest full sentences. “Smart compose” will be rolling out to Gmail users this month.

“Smart compose” was one of a few AI-based announcements that Google made during its I/O keynote. The company explained how it’s using AI to help doctors diagnose and predict health issues, including diabetic retinopathy and various cardiovascular risks. Google also highlighted its new closed-captioning AI feature that isolates individual voices to produce more accurate and understandable closed-captions, particularly in situations that feature more than one person talking at the same time.