AI-Powered Emails: How Generative AI is Making Gmail Smarter and More Efficient

Ray Tomlinson, an American computer programmer, sent the first email ever in 1971. It was a test email and said ‘QWERTYIOP’. Basically gibberish. Since then, we’ve come a long way in using emails.

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Sending and receiving personal messages, business communications, marketing and promotions, sending and receiving important documents, registration and verification – these are just a few ways emails are used in our modern world. In fact, nowadays, companies can run entirely on emails. On an average, about 347.3 billion emails are sent per day.

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Now, imagine if these plain and simple emails got a whole new makeover that would make email communication not just revolutionary but a whole lot more convenient too.

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The Beginning of Generative AI in Gmail

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Google’s Gmail is perhaps the most popular email client with more than 1.5 billion active users globally. Features like Smart Compose and Smart Reply have already been so useful and time-saving for billions of users. These AI-powered features, though small, are pretty mighty.

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See here how easy Gmail makes it to predict what you want to say and then complete the entire sentence for you with the Smart Compose feature. This is a great feature for when you are at a loss of a particular word and can’t seem to figure out what would fit best in your sentence.

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The Smart Reply feature also pre-generates responses for you so you can pick and choose how you want to respond to an email. These responses are generated using machine learning algorithms that analyze the content of the email and suggest pre-written responses based on the context.

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Now, generative AI is taking these tiny features up a notch and changing the way we use Gmail to compose and send emails.

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Newest Generative AI Features for Gmail Users

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Writing emails can be daunting. Whether you’re emailing a very prominent person for a job or critiquing the work of a colleague, finding the right words and tone is tricky business. We all know that written text can be often taken out of context – which means that the receiver of the email could interpret the message in a way that it wasn’t intended to be.

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Which is why Gmail is trying to use generative AI to help people not only get started with writing but also do so with the right execution.

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See how easy Gmail is making for you to write emails in different tones. You can choose from options like ‘formalize’, ‘elaborate’, ‘shorten’ and more to pick your needs and then quickly draft an email without spending a long time wondering what to write.

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It really takes out the stress of composing emails with the right intent.

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There is More To Come

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With everything moving so quickly in the generative AI space, there is no doubt that these AI features in Gmail are just the beginning. Generative AI is already bringing powerful changes to the way we write and interact with email, and we can expect to see even more innovation in this area in the future.

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This could include automatically summarizing long emails, generating personalized product recommendations, or creating entire emails from scratch. As NLP technology continues to improve, generative AI could also become better at understanding the nuances of human language and generating more natural-sounding email responses. We could also expect to see generative AI helping us create more personalized email content than ever before. For example, an AI algorithm could analyze a recipient's social media activity and generate an email that references their recent posts or interests.

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Generative AI could also be used to analyze email communication patterns and identify areas where email communication could be improved. This could include identifying common communication bottlenecks or areas where automated email responses could save time and improve productivity. The sky's the limit!