The Existential Dread of Gmail's Auto-Complete Feature
Its predictive powers make users feel … predictable, robotic, and un-singular.
A specter is haunting Gmail—the specter of a completed sentence. My fingers tap out the beginning of a message, and a grey phantom appears, with eerie anticipation.
“thanks for taking [a look!].”
“tuesday’s no [good sorry].”
“can’t tom[orrow but what about next week?]”
The spectral presence is a technology called . If you’ve used Gmail even once in the last few months, you’ve almost certainly noticed the function, even if you didn’t use it or know its name. Smart Compose is the more advanced kin of another new Gmail technology, called Smart Reply. That’s the name
