Enterprises everywhere are rushing to explore the possibilities of AI, working hard to bring about the promised paradigm shift we’ve all been hearing hyped so much. Google’s been no exception, and the company has been hoarding AI/ML engineers like Pokémon — hiring talent with scant intention to ship products that would compete with its core search engine model.
OpenAI’s Chat GPT took the industry by storm, and unleashed truly a user-friendly generative AI chatbot onto the masses. This left Google with little choice but to get serious aboutAI at the I/O developer conference keynoteearlier this year, even daring to overshadow the launch of three new hardware products.
This newfound vigor to develop features with advanced capabilities and user-friendliness is evident inApprentice Bard, Google’s new generative AI chatbot. Bard seems to be the culmination of the company’sattempts to claw backthe AI mindshare it lost during the meteoric rise of ChatGPT.
Innovation in the wake of ChatGPT
Google’s zealous efforts are also making a difference to how we compose messages on apps like Messages and Gmail — a space where rudimentary AI tools like Smart Compose and Smart Reply could be outclassed by the generative AI-powered Magic Compose.
Those earlier Smart utilities have been equally convenient to use on Workspace apps for the web, as well as their Android equivalents, and Google may see them as mature technologies, while Magic Compose is still under development. However, “outdated” would be a more accurate descriptor. The way I see it, you don’t need three separate tools for the simple task of making composing messages easier.
AlthoughMagic Compose is in beta testingright now, it seems ready to eclipse both Smart Compose and Smart Reply effortlessly, leaving us with tools that overlap in functionality. One could argue they perform three distinct roles, and need to exist concurrently — that well may be true for the time being — but after studying Magic Compose’s capabilities for a while, I’m nearly convinced otherwise.
Smart Reply: Not so smart anymore
Smart Reply has been kicking around since the mid-2010s, when Googleshared research on developing an ML systemthat serves up short, contextually appropriate responses to messages using Natural Language Processing (NLP) smarts. The idea is to help you save time spent responding to texts, replacing the few seconds of typing out a common response with a simple one-tap solution.
Smart Reply became aGmail feature in 2017, and has since permeated to Google Messages,Android Auto, Workspace utilities likethe comments section in Docs, and eventhird-party apps like WhatsApp. It’s also available inmany languages. You can easily pick of one its pre-composed replies from the notification shade or your car’s infotainment screen while driving, but you’re limited by the options presented. At least while in the car, I frequently find myself using the Custom Reply option and relying on Assistant to send something that wasn’t suggested by the ML model.
Smart Reply in Google Chat
Sometimes, Smart Reply suggests emoji as suitable responses, when your own choice of the correct emoji for the situation may differ. There’s also the worry in some cases that a short response may be mistaken for curt behavior. Selecting a Smart Reply and then editing it to suit your preferences doesn’t save you much time either.
Maybe after analyzing the telemetry data of countless users editing AI-suggested phrases, Google could have realized that people need assistancewhile craftingtheir own messages besides an assortment of ready-to-send options —which could explain its other (seemingly redundant) AI autocomplete tool.
Smart Compose: Autocomplete for the off chance it’s accurate
Enter, Smart Compose: AI employed to make message composition faster. Google describes it as autocomplete for your email salutation, valediction, and all the stuff in-between that you type predictably. You can accept the suggestions with a single tap, or just continue typing if you have something different on your mind. The aim is to cut down on the labor and time spent writing the same phrases over and over.
Smart Compose rolled out as a featureexclusive to Gmail on the Pixel 3in 2018. The next year, ittrickled down to everyoneon Gmail, just as the earlier Smart Reply was also going mainstream. Google has continued injecting this AI into other apps, with Google Chat for the webpicking it up just earlier this month. Smart Compose also co-exists with Smart Reply on Google Docs,saving you timecreating documents instead of just helping with responses to comments.
Smart compose in Google Chat
Just like with partners, it’s nice to have someone who completes your sentences, but these relationships have their fair share of problems too. Here, you’re doing most of the typing anyway, and an autocomplete only saves you a few seconds. You have the benefit of contextual, grammatically correct prompts which may even mimic your writing style, but you still have to type out everything that isn’t in the one suggestion you’re served. The AI works well for what it does, but you’re still limited to one autocomplete suggestion at a time.
That essentially explains why Google felt the need to bring yet another AI autocomplete tool into the mix — and most certainly not because ChatGPT made all its existing AI endeavors seem like high school science projects.
Magic Compose and Help me write: Generative wizardry at work
Circling back to where it all began, the Google I/O keynote address earlier this year introduced us to a new message composition tool calledHelp me write— it generates an entire email out of a single-line prompt. CEO Sundar Pichai also showed how to rewrite the entire text on a whim, with a simple command.
The experience of using Help me write feels like employing Bard as your unsalaried typist. Meanwhile, Magic Compose is still in beta, but it hasseeped into Google Messagesalready. Like Smart Reply, the feature suggests multiple suitable responses to incoming texts. But, here, you may also pick your style of response, be it a contemporary emoji-laden text or a verbose Shakespearean answer.
These are by far some of the best text-drafting aids Google AI research has created yet. They have all the good bits of the older tech, like the convenience of a pre-written answer and minimal effort expended when creating and editing a message of your own. Magic Compose also does away with sticking to strictly affirmative or negative answers to most messages, and extremely short messages which receivers may find curt. Magic Compose is almost like the perfect marriage of Smart Reply and Smart Compose.
However, a few limitations have persisted, even despite the slow, careful approach Google took towards bringing true generative AI to its core products. It may be too early to wonder about these issues because both Magic Compose and Help me write are still in beta, but it would be great if we could use preferred Magic Compose responses directly from the notification shade, replacing Smart Reply eventually.
It would also be amazing to see Google fuse Assistant with Magic Compose when bringing this AI feature to Android Auto and popular third-party messaging apps. Another avenue for expansion would be Help me write coming to every app we write in, including Messages, Docs, and third-party apps like Evernote
Since Magic Compose is the manifestation of generative AI in its purest form, I would hope it will be re-trained or updated regularly, furthering its capabilities in the future. However, even if we put Help me write aside for a moment, in the present, Google is maintaining three different writing assistants with overlapping feature sets. This is a waste considering how a little work it would require for Magic Compose to just replace Smart Compose and Smart Reply. I really hope that’s the game plan here.
Google’s use of “Magic” branding for the new conversational AI writing assistants, and the shared “Smart” branding for the older ones is another interesting detail. It’s easier to kill off discrete projects that don’t share the same branding —something Google seems to thoroughly enjoy. For now, I’m just eager to get my hands on the Magic Compose and Help me write betas, as testing expands ahead of an inevitable public launch.
