A new feature was unveiled by Google called ‘Smart Compose’. As suggested by the name it’s a tool that helps you to write your emails. Rather than just giving you spelling suggestions or different sentence structures, this feature goes the extra mile and predicts the rest of your sentence for you using an auto fill while you are typing. This feature of artificial intelligence progresses from last year's Smart Reply, which appeared on the Gmail mobile app. Using this new feature to draft your emails could prove to be a good time saver and will be available to try out in the coming weeks.   

The Smart Reply feature simply offered multiple automatic context related replies to choose from. Smart Compose however improves on this feature in that the suggestions change as you are typing your reply. The feature smoothly operates in the background with minimal interference as you are writing your email. 

Using this artificial intelligence to help draft your emails could be beneficial for both your time and if you struggle with writing.  Smart Compose gets to know how you write and think in order to make its predictive text more accurate. It then saves you time on repetitive writing or grammatical errors, while often giving suggestions for phrases to open or close the email. 

While predictive text is useful when typing in Google is it really necessary when writing a personalised email? Writing an email shouldn’t be seen as an overwhelming task. While predictive text could prove a useful tool for some it could also be seen as a further step to the desocialization of the human brain and the reliance on artificial intelligence. 

It perhaps not an exaggeration to say in the future emails and social media updates could be self generated. The thought of everyone’s Smart Compose being busy on Gmail and updating their social media sounds daunting but it could also serve as the resocialization of more face to face interaction.