It’s 3 p.m. and I’ve been working to clear my e-mail since about 9 a.m. Thanks to Google’s Gmail Autopilot, though, I won’t have to worry about this much longer.
Gmail Autopilot is going to rock the e-mail world and save us busy journalists a lot of time. Announced just before April Fools’ Day, this “new Gmail feature” replies to your Google chats and e-mail based on its analysis of your writing style.
It passes the Turing test with 99.9 percent accuracy, owing to its human-like qualities such as compassion and wisdom.
CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), the underlying technology behind Gmail Autopilot, is similar to ELIZA, that program from the 60s that would trick you into thinking it was a human by asking sympathetic questions.
CADIE even created “her” own home page, which looks just like many others created by humans.
As long as you have a Gmail account, you can give CADIE a try. The documentation about her states that “you can adjust tone, typo propensity and preferred punctuation from the Autopilot tab under Settings.”
Save time. Your contacts won’t know. Best of all, Google explains, “two Gmail accounts can autochat for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot’s responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.”
Eventually, you’ll want to intervene and set the conversations back on track, especially after April Fools’ Day.
