[c_r_w]

For what its worth, I am currently looking at ProtonMail again because I find "suggested replies" too creepy. It is actually stressful, at the "increased heart-rate" level, to see those and be constantly reminded I have no privacy at Google. Gmail is the best email client IMHO but suggested replies may finally drive me away.

[s3r3nity]

I might be a minority, but I actually like this feature, as it has saved my ass a few times already in terms of replying to emails from my boss / boss's boss, so I'd vote to have it be optional rather than have Gmail remove it.

(Edit: it looks like you CAN turn it off in the settings.)

[c_r_w]

I actually would assume the usage stats would be very good on the feature. I am not sure if you can turn it off on the web, I will look again. Unfortunately it is a bit of a Pandora's box situation; just knowing it is happening is the problem. That said, out of sight, out of mind. As much as I like to think I'm driven by principle, I haven't stopped using Gmail yet.

[prlambert]

You can disable Smart Reply from the mobile apps, the setting isn't there on Web yet. Honestly we just haven't prioritized it yet.

Here's some info on how it works if it helps address your concern: We've transformed the language generation problem into a labelling problem. From a systems point of view it's not any different from spam filtering, or tabbed inbox, and we use the exact same features. Smart Reply uses a whitelist of around 30k independently generated & sanitized phrases. You could think of each whitelist entry as a label. So when an email comes in on the delivery pipeline we just label things, like we've always done. We label (spam/not-spam) for spam filtering, we label (promo/social/update/forum) for tabbed inbox, and we label (Thanks!/Sounds good!/etc/etc) for smart reply.

[c_r_w]

Thanks very much for the reply, that is very interesting. It is really a very smart feature, and I cannot explain rationally why that is the one thing that pushes me over the line into "this is too creepy."

Do you record what responses people choose? If so is that data used to personalize the responses or just stored in aggregate?