Google is launching a new feature to smartphones this week called Smart Reply that scans emails and suggest replies.

The system was created as a tool to help take the hassle away from replying to emails on smartphones. The email assistant scans which emails can be answered with a short reply and suggests three responses to each email. Users then simply tap on the Smart Reply suggestion of choice to start editing and adding to it, if required.

“For those emails that only need a quick response, it can take care of the thinking and save precious time spent typing,” Bálint Miklós, Gmail team software engineer, writes in a blog post . “And for those emails that require a bit more thought, it gives you a jump start so you can respond right away.”Smart Reply uses machine learning in the form of an industrial strength neural network to write the emails.“A naive attempt to build a response generation system might depend on hand-crafted rules for common reply scenarios,” Greg Corrado, senior research scientist at Google, writes. “But in practice, any engineer’s ability to invent ‘rules’ would be quickly outstripped by the tremendous diversity with which real people communicate.

“The machine-learned system, by contrast, implicitly captures diverse situations, writing styles, and tones. These systems generalize better, and handle completely new inputs more gracefully than brittle, rule-based systems ever could.”The Smart Reply feature is slated to roll out across Google’s Inbox for Android and iOS apps later this week. Google states that no humans will be reading the emails of Smart Reply users. Those interested can learn more about Smart Reply and its machine-learned system on the in-depth Google Research Blog post

Jenna Pitcher is a freelance journalist writing for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter