Here’s How to Use Gmail’s Smart Compose feature

Prior to making an official announcement at the Google I/O 2018 conference, the company launched the Gmail redesign a few weeks back, bringing new salient features to the classic version of the email service. Among these features, one of the most noticeable features is the Smart Compose feature.

What’s Smart Compose feature?

Smart Compose feature is basically an AI feature which has been recently integrated into the Gmail email service. If you’re already familiar with Gmail’s Smart Reply, which was launched by Google last year, then it would be easy to understand how Smart Compose works. By using this feature, users will be able to draft an email from the scratch. The aim of the feature is to help users compose an email quickly.

In response to an email received by a user, Smart Compose suggests appropriate contextual phrases so they can pick one as a reply. If you happen to like a suggestion, then simply click the ‘tab’ button and use that phrase in your email. This feature quickens your sentence writing process. Google also claims that this feature will most likely reduce grammatical and spelling errors in your email, as a result, you will be able to form a good impression on the sender. So, for instance, if you think your English writing skills are weak and you have troubles while drafting an email, then the Smart Compose feature is going to be your saviour.

This feature operates in the background and as you type an email, it suggests you phrases which you may want to use in the email.

Though the Smart Compose feature has been announced, it is not available to most of the users yet. For now, Google has made it available secretly and has hidden it as an experimental feature in order to get feedback from the users. The company does not want to roll out the feature before testing it out completely.

In case you want to enable the experimental access to this striking feature, you will have to follow some quick and easy steps.

How to Use Gmail’s Smart Compose Feature

To get started with Gmail’s Smart Compose feature, you need to first switch from the classic Gmail to the new Gmail interface. After that, here are the steps you need to follow:

Step 1

Once you have opened on your Gmail, click on the Settings button – the gear-like icon – present on the extreme right of the screen.

Step 2:

Select ‘Settings’ from the drop-down menu.

Step 3:

Once you’re on the Settings page, you will land on the General tab by default. Scroll down a bit until you come across Smart Compose. Remember to click on ‘Experimental Access, which can be found under the General tab, before trying the new features. You may not able to see the Smart Compose feature unless you’ve checked the Experimental Access option.

Step 4:

In this Smart Compose section, click on ‘Writing suggestions on’ option. Underneath it, there’s another option which can be used to switch off the particular feature.

That’s all you need to do in order to activate the Smart Compose feature. It is noteworthy that this feature is only available in the English language. The Gmail support page says that Smart Compose has not been designed to provide answers and may not always predict factually correct information.

As per Google, this feature will be rolled out to all the users in the coming few weeks. Apart from that, it will also be made available for G Suite customers in the workplace, in the coming few months.