How AI is making Gmail a bigger email powerhouse

Gmail has been packed with all sorts of AI gimmicks lately, though not all of them are available to the general public yet. In this article you can read at least what is coming and how it can ensure that you use the e-mail program better so that it saves you as much time as possible.

A blog from Google itself explains how AI should help you in the email program. These are five AI applications:

1. Help me write

This is the most innovative AI application for Gmail. With a few simple keywords it can compile an entire email entirely to your liking. Imagine you want to ask someone for tips for your trip to Japan, or maybe you want to compose an email to ask your manager for a week off: these are all things Help me write can help you with later. You won’t find this option in Gmail yet, but you will find it in Workspace Labs. Unfortunately, it’s only available in English, so we haven’t been able to try it out yet. Once it’s there, you can recognize it by the asterisk with pencil.

2.Smart Compose

If you don’t want the AI ​​to type your entire email, but want to help you along the way, Smart Compose is for you. This uses a hybrid language model that then makes word suggestions. If you see a good suggestion, all you have to do is press the tab key to grab it and continue typing. Again, this function is not available in Dutch, but in English, Spanish, French and Italian. It does work if you type English in Gmail, as you can see in the example below (the suggestion is in light gray).

3. The tabs in your inbox

Not everyone finds this useful, but often when you first set up your Gmail, it looks like a tabbed inbox. That means that Google has created some tabs within your inbox and an automatic mail filter. There is a tab with primary mails, with promotions, with socials, updates and forums. You can choose which one you use or not, but you can imagine that emails from Facebook about a like go to the socials tab and emails with offers from webshops where you sometimes shop for promotions. If the classification system is completely wrong, you can give it a helping hand by dragging the mail to the correct tab. Google learns from that.

Related articles

4. Smart Reply

Imagine that you have a client who asks once every week: ‘Can you handle this?’ Did you know that you don’t even have to type an answer at all? With Smart Reply, Google ensures that a few standard answers are ready. There are often three, with something along the lines of yes, something along the lines of no and the message that you have received the email, although it does depend on the context that Gmail extracts from the email text itself. Machine learning is used to provide three potential answers based on past examples. Very handy, especially if you are in a hurry.

5. Summaries

For example, if you receive an email from Booking or Transavia confirming your booking, you will see a section in white at the top with a quick summary of what you have booked. This way you can quickly see when you have to fly again, but also whether you have booked your hotel on the right date. Gmail makes these summaries for you, they do not come from the provider. It does this by using machine learning, among other things, to filter certain data from an email and thus summarize it, as it were.

Which AI application within Gmail do you prefer to use? Leave it now in the comments.