At its Cloud Next conference, Google today announced that Smart Compose, a new feature in Gmail that essentially autocompletes sentences for you, will become available to all G Suite users in the coming weeks.
Smart Compose is part of the new Gmail, where it has been available for the last few months as an experimental feature for those who opt in to using it. In my experience, it can occasionally save you a few keystrokes, though don’t think that it’ll automatically write your emails for you. It’s mostly useful for greetings, addresses and finishing relatively standard phrases for you. To be fair, that’s what most emails consist of, and when it works, it works really well.
Over time, the system trains itself to learn more about how you write and what you write about. “It gets smarter over time by learning your colleagues’ names, your favorite phrases and specific jargon,” Google’s VP for product management for G Suite David Thacker explained during a press briefing.
To use Smart Compose, you simply type your emails and when it thinks that it can help you complete the sentence, the Smart Compose feature writes the next few words for you and you can hit tab to accept them.
It’s worth nothing that the launch of Smart Compose goes against one of Google’s most cherished traditions: announcing features at I/O that won’t launch for another 10 months. It’s only been two months or so since Google first announced this new feature.
