Google’s new “Help Me Write” makes responding to emails easier than ever

Cutting corners: Google devotes countless resources to analyzing and refining how we communicate via electronic messaging. The evolution of artificial intelligence gave these efforts a boost, helping it to roll out solutions such as Smart Reply in 2017 and Smart Compose in 2018. At this year’s developer’s conference, Google introduced its newest AI-driven feature, which provides the ability to generate complete email responses at the push of a button.

Google held its annual developer’s conference, Google I/O, earlier at its Mountain View campus. Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced several topics and announcements during the event’s keynote, ranging from updates to Google Maps to its 3D teleconferencing solution, Project Starline. One particular new feature announcement, called “Help Me Write” has caught the attention of almost 2 billion Gmail users.

From Smart Reply â¡ï¸Â “Help me write” in Gmail ð§µï¿½”#GoogleIO pic.twitter.com/u0ILECSMN4

– Google (@Google) May 10, 2023

Since their release, Google’s previous Smart Reply and Smart Compose features have helped users create basic replies and offered predictive text suggestions. Help Me Write expands upon these capabilities, allowing users to generate and elaborate upon entire messages in a single click.

Google developers designed the technology to help minimize the time spent crafting simple, repetitive messages and responses to routine questions and needs. Pichai’s demonstration shows a user replying to an email, clicking on the new feature’s icon, and entering a prompt describing the response’s desired intent. The result was a clear and accurate email that included elements directly related to the original message. Once crafted, Help Me Write users can manually edit, ask the AI to elaborate, or shorten the message.

A recent blog post referenced this new email functionality and several other AI-assisted authoring tools, all part of Google’s new Duet AI for Google Workspace. Similar to the email authoring capabilities of Help Me Write, the new Workspace tool suite offers users AI-assisted features to generate text and visual content via descriptive prompts. For example, Duet AI will help Google Slide users generate new, original prompt-based visuals for their presentations.

Sheets users can also leverage Google’s AI to simplify their data-centric tasks. Duet AI’s new Help Me Organize feature can support users by automatically creating custom plans to track tasks and projects using the same prompt-based description functionality.

Users interested in previewing these new technologies can register to access them via Google’s Workspace Labs sign-up page. Selected users will receive access to Google’s latest generative AI features in Workspace and the opportunity to provide feedback regarding its use, issues, and potential improvements before public release.