Series Pit Stops

Introducing ML Kit’s Smart Reply

Following up from the previous blog posts covering the APIs available in Firebase’s ML Kit, this post will be covering one of the most recently released APIs—Smart Reply, which allows you to implement automatic replies based on previous bits of conversation in your Android and/or iOS app.

This API allows you to pass in a list of text messages, and in turn it identifies the context and returns a list of 3 suggested text messages that you can send as a reply to those original messages.

A sample use case could be apps that use a chatbot, which can take in the messages sent by the users and provide them with an answer (for support or other kinds of assistance). This feature could also be useful if you’re adding messaging capabilities to an app.

We already see a lot of apps like Gmail, LinkedIn, etc. implementing this feature in their apps, but with this API from ML Kit, the feature will become more widely available for all different types of user experiences.

For this tutorial, we’ll be showing how to implement Smart Reply in an Android demo app. Before we get started, here are some screenshots that showcase the end result: