Some believe that email is bloated and dying, but by implementing advances from its machine learning and AI teams, Google has been using Inbox - its Gmail-based mobile email client - as a way to raise the bar on how to improve the experience and make it once again into a productive place to communicate with people.
Google says that the feature, which is due to launch later this week, will work like this: when you receive an email, Smart Reply will "read" the content of it and select three basic responses at the bottom of the screen for a quick response.
In both the case of that app and Smart Reply, the pain point is a well-known one: it's actually kind of a pain to type on smartphones for most people and so creating ways to circumvent this as much as possible makes a lot of sense.
Google has over the years built up a massive team of people working in areas like machine learning, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to build out features in search, mobile and many of its applications.