[joshuamorton]

On the other hand, I care about communicating so much that I want to focus solely on the thoughts, not the form. So I defer the form (such as spelling and completing phrases) to a tool, so that I can focus on the content. This is essentially the same thing that writing tools like Hemingway do. They force you to focus on content, whereas autocomplete lets you focus on content.

Saying you don't want to be subjected to machine generated communication to me says that you don't want to read anything written in the past 10 or so years. Practically everything written in that time frame is in some way machine generated or edited.

Like I said, just because something is in part machine generated doesn't make it not thoughtful.

[ocdtrekkie]

I think trying to suggest spellcheck and your email client writing sentences for you as the same thing is incredibly disingenuous. One fixes the content, one generates it.

[joshuamorton]

I'm suggesting that autocomplete of words and autocomplete of short phrases aren't substantively different, yes. Especially given that a lot of mobile keyboards already essentially do this.

I can type "I" and then my phone's keyboard will suggest "be there at" as the phrase completion it does this a single word at a time, but in practice it does let me complete a phrase. If I don't want to say that, I'm capable of not using the autocomplete suggestions. There's no substantive difference with Smart Compose except that I don't have to confirm between every word, so its slightly more efficient.

I'm not sure what you think smart compose is doing, but "writing sentences for you" isn't it.[1] So no, I think you're either misunderstanding what this is, or perhaps you're being disingenuous by describing it as something that writes sentences for you.

[1]: Granted given the Duplex demo and other work in the NLP space, I expect that in certain contexts a tool that given an instruction like "set up a meeting with John this week" that schedules it over emails (like x.ai[2], which has been around for quite some time) is totally possible, but Smart Compose isn't it.

[2]: https://x.ai/

[typomatic]

> I want to focus solely on the thoughts, not the form.

I think this is a dangerously stupid way to think about linguistics.

[joshuamorton]

I mean in certain contexts absolutely. I certainly wouldn't use smart compose to write a novel, but then I don't think it would be very helpful for creative writing where or writing where my focus is on tone.

But for otherwise mechanical things ("hey can we set up a meeting tomorrow", "do you want to grab lunch at ____ today"), the form is mostly irrelevant. It's the kind of thing where if we weren't in a formal context, I'd write as "hey u wanna grab fud at ____ later". I'm not losing anything by having a tool formalize that to "Hey do you want to eat lunch at ____ today." Again, we already do that a lot. As far as I can tell, this is just doing that a bit faster.