Computer, Respond to This Email
googleresearch.blogspot.com
googleresearch.blogspot.com
For example, the stuff in Google labs (gmail) has had some silly things like don't hit send when you're drunk but sometimes very useful features which may be considered unorthodox like "Gmail telling you when it thinks you wanted to attach a file but forgot".
It's something I wouldn't generally associate with a very corporate design but here they are wanting to add another silly feature and who knows how it will turn out? Maybe it will be super useful and then all the other companies will start to copy it.
But the thing is they're inventing new ways that really don't fit your product development roadmaps. I really like that about them.
That one's not that hard.
Also, Gmail has lots of users who speak languages other than English... has anyone tested whether the forgotten attachment detector works for them too?
Now, I don't remember about pine and mutt. They probably didn't.
Sure, if you use the word thinks. If you instead say "if msg.Contains "attach" then warn" it's not that impressive.
The feature in the article is a bit more than a single if.
That does not feel like a top-down design idea, but a bottom-up feature designed by an engineer who was sick of those moments where he/she had lost the cursor.
Trails, man....
E.g. Someone writes me an email about a rare kink you often talk about. You're the main data point on that kink, so it suggests I respond with something you often say when you talk about this topic, maybe including personal details. It's not a totally precise or realistic example, but with large numbers and complex models, unintended things are bound to happen on occasion. Will those things leak information?
As for your comment that the potential replies are limited in number and as structured as you say, I don't get that from the original post, and it doesn't quite fit with my understanding of the model.
For example; after purchasing a book on Amazon recently I happened to do a Google search on that book and the first thing I see is, "Your book is scheduled to be delivered on..." Aside from the creepy factor I'm left wondering what purpose this serves? I just ordered the book. I KNOW it's on its way.
Turns out they just mined my emails from Gmail to provide it in search results.
I'm sure some developer or product manager thought it would be a cool thing to do without giving any consideration to usefulness much less user privacy. I really don't feel like Google needs to know what I'm buying thankyouverymuch. Gmail account: closed.
To me, this phrase is the essence of much of Google's features. To my discredit, I chuckled when I read the blog's phrase "we've used...deep neural networks to improve...YouTube thumbnails." I am certain this was no easy task, and a resulting technical breakthrough. But doesn't it sound kind of petty?
Of course, what's petty for one is essential for another. I wish every e-mail client had that "undo send" feature, which was just GMail whimsy years ago. Is the line between petty and essential always going to be blurred?
Just because you don't see it as convenient or even useful doesn't mean no one else does.
Edit: It is under Your personal info -> Search settings -> Manage settings
One man's "creepy factor" is another's superbly useful feature. The feeling of creepiness probably stems from being surprised and defaulting to negative reaction. Remember that GMail was never supposed to be a dumb mailbox. If you want a dumb mailbox, there are tons of alternatives (i.e. almost every other provider and various open-source UI packages).
Honestly, I really enjoy those "creepy" features and want much more. For me, they can, and definitely should.
Abuses of this technology are inevitable, but we haven't seen it yet. It's the source of magical "how did they do that" wow factor in technology that touch screens and thin devices used to have.
> And please - like Google cares that you ordered that book from Amazon. Until they do.
Well, if Google starts caring that I ordered a book from Amazon (more than they already do - Google Now shows me info on my purchases, including delivery time), then they'll do what exactly? Tell their self-driving cars to kill me because I didn't use Google Play?
Google so far has a stellar history of being helpful, pro-user, quite often pro-bono at it. Please apply these levels of scrutiny to someone else first, like every other SV startup running on the investor-storytime model.
For example, a government (China?) may pass a law to force Google to disclose the list of nationals who bought certain books (political book criticising the Chinese government?), and Google may choose to comply to stay in that market.
But basically, you can draw such arguments about anything. What if the evil government asks my local bookstore for CCTV recordings and credit card recipes? What if they ask my bank?
If your government wants to be evil, they will find a way to do this, regardless of whether people posted their data all over the Internet or not. The problem is with your government and not with the tools they would use in a hypothetical, unlikely scenario of going batshit insane in the nearby future. It's like a country deciding to destroy all roads and bridges because they can be used by an invasion force to quickly overrun the country. Well, they would be, but since you destroyed them your enemy will airdrop soldiers on you in the extremely unlikely future when they decide to invade. In the meantime, you have no roads and bridges.
1. getting a warrant and running down to the book shop to ask them about what a single suspect bought, and
2. Having enormous amounts of data collected about hundreds of millions of people, processed and interpreted, essentially sitting in one place. Whether Google voluntarily gives it up or not is almost irrelevant (as we saw, the NSA is happy to tap Google's private fiber without their knowledge even when Google is cooperating on other fronts).
Of course the government will find ways to be evil if it wants (and I think that we're generally lucky because it doesn't seem to want to with any particular intensity). But that's not really the point here.
It's the difference between having many small, complicated little targets that each yield very little information, versus one conveniently enormous target that yields information on everyone.
I structured my previous comment in this way to proactively address the argument that someone always brings up - the story of how Nazi Germany used census data to track down and exterminate Jews. My point being that yes, evil government could use this data to do evil things in an efficient way, but it doesn't mean that we have to proactively stop doing censuses - they have many other, real, actual, positive uses.
Or another example - the best way to prevent a house fire from burning down a neighbourhood is to not build houses near each other. But instead, we invest in firefighters, better materials and procedures, all of which addresses the problem of fire spread. Why? Because we want the houses to be close to each other.
I have no doubt that in the vast majority of the email space, this will do great, but wonder will it leak privacy anywhere at all?
I worry a bit about the long-term risks of this kind of training (query / reply). While this is obviously very far from being "high resolution" enough to single out very specific information, at some point these kinds of tools (and assistant AIs that can answer questions) will out of necessity be able to converse around very domain specific topics. At this point, how do they know what data is private and what is not? It could be tempting to train these AIs on chat logs or e-mail conversations, but that'd give them knowledge of very private information which they might leak to others. Even if they're limited to data that is accessible anonymously, they'd be extremely good at picking up information that wasn't intended for the public. For example, if you could describe a person called /u/andreasblixt on reddit, and leave it up to the bot to put the pieces together that this person is also on Facebook, Twitter, etc... and that obscure forum from 10 years ago. Food for thought.
A final thought on this... When these assistant AIs will inevitably have to know something about you. For example, your preferred schedule, food restrictions, preferred airlines, name, family, friends, phone numbers, where you were last night, who you've talked to, etc. Even if we all get our own namespaced AI assistant (i.e., the trained neural network that contains private information is stored and encrypted for your access only), that assistant's "brain" may very well become a prized target because if you get access to it you can interrogate it for information (you most likely can't just access the information in any meaningful way – you'd literally have to give it queries to make it return semantic output with the information you're trying to access).
Anyway, automatic e-mail responses, yay!
When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former.
I still use a variety of Google products all the time, but when they're training machines to understand the meaning of my emails, I begin to think perhaps that's beyond my comfort zone. I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something. I get that in most cases this isn't ever going to have a practical effect, but I would be a lot more comfortable if our society's data stewards were less blase about that side of things.
> When their primary financial incentive is user engagement to sell ads, I have a hard time believing that the latter doesn't influence the use of my data as much as the former.
I don't agree with it in case of Google. I may be mistaken, but my impression was that they sort of separate their products into two groups - the ad-related are earning the money, and then the money is spent on funding something else (like GMail), with little direct connection between the two groups. That is, products like GMail certainly help Google earn more money on ads, but are not themselves optimized for ad-related purposes.
> I think that machine learning has tremendous things to offer society, but I'm not sure I'm super excited about a company using smartish machines to pull meaning and context from my emails so that we can save some percentage of users 10 seconds when they reply to something.
I think you're seriously underestimating the potential for productivity gains here. Mobile use case is perfect for replying to e-mails, but mobile experience totally sucks. This service, if it works as advertised, will be probably saving not 10 seconds, but something like one minute per e-mail. That + friction reduction have enabling properties that make people do things they didn't before (e.g. I often don't reply to e-mails on a phone only because it's too slow, opting to browse Facebook instead), and aggregated that can help liberate a lot of time.
I would love if companies would explore on-device processing more. While it might not work in this case, it should work fine for e.g. data extraction for flight tracking, hotel bookings, package tracking, etc.
Look at some ads, get some great web services. Seems a fair tradeoff.
The latter makes it sound (willfully) as if random third parties have access to the information Google has collected, which is a pretty blatant falsehood. Anyone is able to go sign up for an Adwords account and see how "targeting" works. At no point does the advertiser get to see anything about the people.
The whole "Google is selling you/You're the product" meme is a breathless, thought terminating cliche that needs to die.
They have managed to sell the ability to include content in HTTP responses sent to my requests, though.
what would you call it?
The entire point of the "if you're not paying, you're the product" spiel is that everybody already knows everything you said, but there's a fundamental difference between paying and not paying. You're not going to get that far demanding that people stop thinking there's a difference, nor are people going to stop verbalizing that difference, nor should they. What's cliche on HN is something the vast majority of the rest of the world still has not heard, and in this case, ought to.
And it's not FUD to point out where money flows really come from. In fact I find myself wondering why you are so passionate about people not talking about it? It's not an invalid observation, a lie, or something irrelevant, so people aren't going to stop talking about it. Generally jumping up and down and shouting "Stop following the money!" is, well, not how conversations on HN go, shall we say? If you're searching for something to be contrarian about I can provide a few better candidates....
In EU my personal information (my name, my username, my email addresses, my clicks, my metadata, etc) is mine and there are limits to what you can do with it.
In US who knows. There seems to be strict rules on HIPPA, and some tax stuff, and some money laundering stuff. But other than that selling the data seems to be fine.
Today I got an email because a website where I had an account was sold (from one SevenOne subsidary to another one) and they explained who owned it before, who will own it after, and explained to me that I’d have to allow them to copy my account data to the new company, otherwise it would not be transferred and thereby be lost.
That’s how you do it.
When US startups I have accounts with get bought – like WhatsApp – I never got an email asking if they could sell my data to Facebook.
I like the phrase as it draw attention to the fact that the services offered aren't "free" but rather are paid via a mechanism that a typical user wouldn't think about. Sure it is shocking, but it is useful.
I'm not sure how it is FUD ... your data is being repackaged and sold off to the highest bidder. There's no doubt in that.
Spreading FUD is a demagogue's job, I would never condone it.
Congrats.
Companies only interested in short-term profits might be willing to strip mine their users and treat them poorly. Companies that are interested in the long term have an incentive to treat their users well, i.e. as if they were paying customers.
What would you say of a private highway that sells billboards? If the business model of a private highway is not tolls, but instead selling ads along the road. "You're not the user, you're the product?" Would you say the highway owner is selling the personal information of the drivers?
The people buying billboards do not receive any personal identifying information about the drivers, they are instead buying access through an auction, like if this particular highway feeds into a sporting arena, then it is likely a good place to put ads for football fashion.
Within Google, Gmail/Inbox are Products. Their success metrics are user happiness and usage statistics. Like many startups, Google produces products which get marketshare and please users first, and then figure out the business model later. Google itself was launched with no real business model. And when Gmail was created, there was probably no plan on how to make money on it. They just wanted to do something awesome, and Gmail was born.
If it's funded primarily by the billboards and not by the drivers, then yes, the billboard purchasers are the real customers. And that could potentially lead to poor results, such as optimizing for billboard viewing time rather than safety and throughput.
Google's users are not its products. You might claim its users are not its customers (users != customers), but that does not imply the users ARE the products. Just like the New York Times readers are not the real business customers, the advertisers are, however no one has ever exclaimed "The New York Times Readers are the Products!"
The Product is the New York Times, because that is the thing _Being Produced_. It is the work product of the journalists.
Likewise, the work product of the engineers, SREs, PMs, managers, ops and support for Gmail is the Gmail Service. That is what is created out of the hours they put in. There is an ancillary product that leverages externalities produced those products (virtual real estate to auction off), but it is not people's data as the product being sold.
This meme is really tiresome because it doesn't get to the root of the matter, which is, are the incentives of those working on Google's products aligned with the incentives of the business operations which have to derive a return on those investments.
There are two ways to look at this depending on your level of cynicism:
1. Google is a smart company that looks at the long term and realizes value by the creation of positive externalities. That is, it works from the premise that if you make good products that please your users, you will retain and get more of them, and there will be opportunities to monetize that. That is, retaining users is paramount, ergo, user trust, branding, and generally not pissing off users is very important.
2. Google is a short sighted company that looks at what is currently has, lets bean counters manipulate its products purely to increase the bottom line by maximizing the amount of stuff they can sell. This means, they only consider the wishes of advertisers, and act to increase purely the amount of ads that can be shown, regardless of how much it annoys users.
Now, you can decide to believe #2 or #1 depending on how harshly you view the trajectory of Google products over the years. To be sure, they have done things that have annoyed users. But I believe, based on evidence of actually working here, that the primary impetus of engineers and product managers who guard the high level product features, that the focus is tipped towards user concerns.
No, the product being sold is viewers and viewing times.
Which means the highway owner will try to make sure that everyone has to use this highway for their commute, no others, and then the owner will try to make sure people drive slower, so they see more ads.
And I can tell you, Google is definitely #2. Many examples in the past showed that. Like them directly ignoring a law, and then arguing in court "but throwing away all the data we got when we violated that law would mean we’d have to collect it legally, and that would cost millions!" (Compare: Google vs. Federal Republic of Germany: Street View)
Google is definitely not user focused.
Another (equivalent) accurate way is that you are, in fact, a paying customer for the product you are consuming, but a customer that pays in-kind with things that they use to create another product that they sell to people who pay with money.
* This is an automated response
Does anyone know where I can find out more about this? A paper or something maybe?
This gets really exciting when implemented on a smartwatch. Single tap responses that are actually useful would make smartwatches significantly more powerful. Speech recognition is great but it's not always appropriate for social environments.
Is it trained mostly on personal gmail accounts?
You can play around with the dumb little AI app that I've been working on that does a little bit of NLP in the browser. Check out this site with Chrome: https://yc-prototype.appspot.com. His name is Bertie. You should see his face on the bottom of the page. The site works like an OS in your browser.
A bot like that is a great tool to experiment with NLP and ML ideas. This is really an intriguing area of research.
Imo, this has already been solved. I just whisper replies into my watch for both email and SMS. Google's voice recognition is finally good enough for this. I can't think of anything more convenient.
I'm not sure if AI-ish replies are something I'm interested in. Throwing complex fuzzy logic at what should be a hardware/interface problem seems shortsighted. I prefer a much higher level of granular control, especially if these messages are work related.
dudette:are we still on for dinner with my mom?
dude:sure, cant wait to see mrs.Plinketon again.
dudette gets suggested reply message generated from one of dude's earlier emails to his friends: "mrs.Plinketon has great tits!"
It is amazing to realize this type of technology can be bootstrapped only once (?)- as soon as you start getting automated replies in the system quality of learning on past data will drop, at some point snake will be eating his own automated reply tail.
I imagine this system would benefit greatly from optional additional user voice input, something as simple as 1-3 spoken words fed back into Reply network to help with the reply intent decoding. You get email, NN generates 3 replies it thinks you would like, you have different idea for a reply, click microphone icon and say "no, maybe next week", Reply network rebuilds suggested answers with your input shaping reply vector.
Sadly I think its something you either get used to or go live in the woods.
Furthermore, training LSTM networks on emails has nothing to do with what you are concerned about.
(Note that I personally think Google's collection is more ethically defensible than the NSA's, if only because they at least seek implied consent whereas the NSA doesn't even have to pretend)
The worrisome thing is that it while it used to be the privileged who insulated themselves from the "real" world by having staff answer their email, this would let everyone do that, and that might give everyone more tunnel vision.
Human communication and our social skills in general have already detoriated a lot by replacing face to face conversations with audio only, then text.
This is just further taking away the incentive to sneak in something personal, something human into our written communication every now and then.
IMO, the very reason someone takes the time to type out these kinds of questions as an email message is to make it more personal. Otherwise, they could just use an rsvp/calendar system or a bug tracker for the particular queries in the article, which already enable you to send such generic replies with 1 or 2 taps at most.
Can we stop misusing technology to dumb down our everyday lives and stop transforming our society into a bunch of isolated individuals living on the same planet?
Has there been any progress in AI-driven/assisted creative writing (other than sportscasts)?
But does that mean I'll have to re-enable Inbox to try it. Duh :(
That the humans at Google may read my email is the least of my privacy concerns. That the robots will pass them along to other robots at places other than google is the real worry. But as no such agency exists, why worry?
- using mannerisms I have used with the sender in past emails
- scan my calendar schedule and have an idea of my availability and use that in the response
The product in its current form sounds great and I'm keen to give it a try.
further extension, pull out quick answers from other emails, i.e., "what's the sales number this month?" "100M" from another email
> Obama: Hey Hillary, what do you think, should we bomb <X>?
> Hillary: Sure! Count me in!
> Hillary: Hey! Don't consider that last email! Damn auto reply...
That aside, as a fellow nerd, neural net FTW!
Once it is sent, it is gone.
I always have fun with those "Please delete messages" from Outlook sent to my email client.
How to use: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/1284885?hl=en