Life

You Can Let Gmail Predict Your Subject Lines For You Now

BDG Media, Inc.

Emailing just gets easier and easier for us lazy people — and I, for one, am all for it. Gmail has celebrated its 15th birthday — which is a crazy thought for those of us old enough to remember when it came out — and one of the ways they're celebrating is adding an update that will let Gmail predict subject lines of emails for you. While Gmail already makes things pretty simple, by suggesting text through the Smart Compose option that keeps you from having to do as much actual writing/thinking/not being owned by a machine, this is a big step forward — and it's not the only thing that Gmail has on offer.

Basically, as part of the 15th anniversary updates, Gmail is improving on Smart Compose to make it even better and more personalized to you. "Smart Compose is also getting, well, smarter," the company explained in a blog post. "It will personalize suggestions for you, so if you prefer saying 'Ahoy,' or 'Ello, mate' in your greetings, Smart Compose will suggest just that. It can also suggest a subject line based on the email you’ve written."

In other news, please don't ever start your emails with "Ahoy" or "Ello, mate" — unless you are a sailor, in which case... no, still please don't do it. "Hi" is just fine, thanks. But for those of us who agonize over what to put in a subject line, this could be a huge improvement.

It's easy to imagine that Smart Compose updates like this will seem a little odd at first, but in about three months I'm sure we'll be wondering how we ever lived without them and huffing dramatically every time we have to write our own email subjects. Changes in technology can seem really jarring, but become second nature in a big hurry.

Subject lines were just one of the new Gmail options that the company announced would be rolled out shortly. It will also be offering a Schedule Send option, which will allow you to schedule emails to take place in the future — great if you want to make sure something lands in a person's inbox as soon as they get into the office, you don't want to bother them when they're on vacation, or you're sending in-between time zones. There will also be more options for Smart Compose — in new languages, on mobile, and sounding more like you. Perhaps one of the handiest updates, however, will be updates that allow you to do more without leaving your inbox.

"You can respond to a comment thread in Google Docs, browse hotel recommendations and more, directly within emails," the company explained in a blog post. "This way you don’t have to open a new tab or app to get things done." A definite win for idiots like me who are suffocating under the weight of their open tabs and don't know what to do about it. Please help me my family is dying and I just keep opening tabs of news stories I want to be smart enough to understand.

Gmail is celebrating it's 15th birthday in a big way — with updates that all of its users can benefit from. They said the the updates will start being rolled out from April 1st, so you may start to see some changes and new options in your Gmail account before long. And soon, awkward subject lines may be a thing of the past.