How to enable and use the Gmail Smart Response and Smart Compose tools

Before Gmail’s 15th birthday last year, Google added many machine learning and productivity tools to its email service. (You may also have been trying to make up for the disappearance of your Inbox email app, but that’s an argument for another day.) The additions included a way for Gmail to write email subject lines for you and schedule an email to send later. hour.

It can be a little confusing to navigate some of Gmail’s features. In this tutorial, we will focus on the Gmail Smart Reply and Smart Compose auto-completion tools, which are designed to save time.

Allowing a machine to help you write emails and subject lines to you may seem a bit unusual, but if you’re open to at least trying it out for yourself, here are the ways to automate your Gmail responses.

Enabling smart response and smart composition

To allow Gmail to generate email responses and text messages, you must first opt ​​for its Settings menu. If you are a regular Gmail user (instead of G Suite Enterprise Edition), here is what you should do:

On the desk

• Click the settings icon at the top right and find the Settings page.
• Scroll down to the separate Smart Reply and Smart Composition options and choose “On” for one or both to enable automated suggestions.
• You can also choose to allow Gmail machine learning to personalize your suggestions based on the way you write your emails by choosing “Smart composition personalization”. For example, if you greet your colleagues with “Hello, team” versus “Hello, everyone”, what you use most frequently will be automatically added.

If you use G Suite, you may notice that the option to activate Smart Compose is not available. Your G Suite administrator must enable this for your organization, so please contact the person in charge if you want to test this on the job.

In the Android or iOS application

• Tap the hamburger icon on the top left side to open the side drawer. Scroll down to Settings.
• Select the Gmail account you want to address
• Touch the check box under Smart reply and / or Smart composition to activate the mode

Once the setting is turned on, your Gmail is set to suggest answers and help automatically finish sentences based on your writing style.

How it looks

Basically, you just start typing, and Gmail will start suggesting words that might fit the sentence you’re typing.

Please note that it will not always appear for every email you write. Because Gmail needs context, you will likely find Smart Compose ringing when you reply to an email or if you are starting emails with some generic statements like “Nice to meet you” or “I hope you are fine”. If Gmail has a suggestion, an opaque text set will appear next to what you’re typing.

In the desktop version of Gmail, you can press Tab to accept the suggestion. In the mobile app, if a suggested word or phrase appears, swipe right to add it to the email.

Smart Compose can also suggest email subjects. Leave the subject line blank and start typing your email. Once you return to fill in the subject line, Gmail will offer you a suggestion that you can accept by pressing Tab in the desktop app or swiping right on the mobile.

Smart answer for canned answers

Smart Reply works a little faster than Smart Compose. Instead of suggesting short words or phrases for you, Gmail will offer three responses that could be adapted to the email you received. For example, if you have received an email reminding you of an appointment, Smart Reply may suggest responses such as “Confirmed,” “Thank you,” or “I can’t do it.”

Tapping these responses will not send the email right away. You can add more text to the suggested answer before choosing to send it.

If you’re in an email conversation with multiple people, be aware that replying with a Smart Reply will send a CC to everyone in that email. You’ll have to manually delete the people you don’t want in that reply, so it’s best to choose only Smart Reply for the emails you want to send to everyone in the thread.

Should you really use it?

Choosing to let a machine type your emails may seem impersonal, but it is not designed to write all email for you. Smart Compose and Smart Reply work best when you use them to add fill-in sentences or quickly reply to unanswered or unanswered emails. Also, Gmail has improved a lot by suggesting answers that will make sense 90 percent of the time. (In my experience, responses tend to shift to affirmative responses, so they may not work better if you are less likely to accept everything.)

Also, if you try this and find that you prefer to write your own answers, just go back to Settings and disable those features.

Update July 6, 2020, 5:10 pm ET: This article was originally published on April 5, 2019; the introduction and instructions for using Smart Replay and Smart Compose have been updated