Artificial Insmelligence

I don't really read tech news any more so the new "intelligent" features in Gmail have crept up on me. There are two that I've noticed, but not really used very much in my everyday communications because, well, they're not very suitable for my everyday communication style!

The first is the one above, the suggested responses on mobile. My wife forwarded me a work e-mail in which she was praised by someone else. Yes Google, these are appropriate responses, I suppose, but how do you know that I want to send my wife entirely appropriate responses? If you were really applying some intelligence rather than an algorithm to a large corpus of data (all the e-mails anyone's ever sent via gmail? just mine?) you'd know things that I'm more likely to say. I'm never going to say "congratuations!" for example. This feels like a way for "the machine" to regulate human communication, cut down on diversity of vocabulary and just make us all a lot duller.

The other feature is the kind of predictive text in the browser version. It's a bit weak too. I haven't found out yet what triggers it, it seems rather random and tentative. I mean, if I'm writing to a single address and you know the first name of the person I'm writing to (because it's in my contacts) then if I start "Dear" I'd hope that something like this would be able to insert the first name of that person. Or at least to suggest it. Instead every now and then I find a few words tagged on to the end of what I'm typing, mostly which aren't right and anyway it's a faff for me to reach over to the tab key to autocomplete, I can type what you've suggested faster than I can make you autocomplete.

Humbug.