Our new study, published today in the journal Information Research, suggests that leaving all your emails in the inbox is likely to leave you dissatisfied with your personal records management.

In an exploratory survey, we asked participants how they dealt with their personal records such as bills, online subscriptions and similar items. Many of these arrive by email.

We found that most respondents left their electronic records in their email. Only half saved items such as bills and other documents to other locations, like their computer or the cloud. But having a disorganised inbox also led to problems, including missing bills and losing track of important correspondence.

The risk of losing track of your emails

Receiving bills, insurance renewals and other household documents by email saves time and money, and reduces unnecessary paper use.

However, there are risks involved if you don’t stay on top of your electronic records. Respondents in our research reported issues such as lapsed vehicle registration, failing to cancel unwanted subscriptions, and overlooking tax deductions because it was too much trouble finding the receipts.

This suggests late fines and other email oversights could be costing people hundreds of dollars each year.

In addition to the financial costs, research suggests that not sorting and managing electronic records makes it more difficult to put together the information needed at tax time, or for other high-stakes situations, such as loan applications.

What did we find?

We surveyed over 300 diverse respondents on their personal electronic records management. Most of them were from Australia, but we also received responses from other countries, such as the United Kingdom, United States, Switzerland, Portugal and elsewhere.

Two-thirds of the respondents used their email to manage personal records, such as bills, receipts, subscriptions and more. Of those, we found that once respondents had dealt with their email, about half of them would sort the emails into folders, while the other half would leave everything in the inbox.

While most sorted their workplace email into folders, they were much less likely to sort their personal email in the same way.

The results also showed that only half (52%) of respondents who left all their email in the inbox were satisfied with their records management, compared to 71% of respondents who sorted their email into folders.

Of the respondents who saved their paperwork in the cloud (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox and similar), 83% reported being satisfied with their home records management.

The study was exploratory, so further research will be needed to see if our findings apply more universally. However, our statistical analysis did reveal practices associated with more satisfactory outcomes, and ones that might be better to avoid.

What can go wrong with an inbox-only approach?

Based on the responses, we have identified three main problems with leaving all your email in the inbox.

First, users can lose track of the tasks that need to be done. For example, a bill that needs to be paid could slip down the line unnoticed, drowned by other emails.

Second, relying on search to re-find emails means you need to know exactly what you’re looking for. For example, at tax time searching for charity donation receipts depends on remembering what to search for, as well as the exact wording in the email containing the receipt.

Read More: Stop emailing yourself: the best file sharing options across devices

Third, many bills and statements are not sent as attachments to emails, but rather as hyperlinks. If you change your bank or another service provider, those hyperlinks may not be accessible at a later date. Not being able to access missing payslips from a former employer can also cause issues, as shown by the Robodebt scandal or the recent case of the Australian Tax Office reviving old debts.

4 tips for better records management

When we asked respondents to nominate a preferred location for keeping their personal records, they tended to choose a more organised format than their current behaviour. Ideally, only 8% of the respondents would leave everything in their email inbox, unsorted.

Our findings suggest a set of practices that can help you get on top of your electronic records and prevent stress or financial losses:

• sort your email into category folders, or save records in folders in the cloud or on a computer
• download documents that are not attached to emails or sent to you – such as utility bills and all your payslips
• put important renewals in your calendar as reminders, and
• delete junk mail and unsubscribe, so that your inbox can be turned into a to-do list.

• Matt Balogh is an Adjunct Lecturer, University of New England
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

Gone will be the days when users needed to rely on their cellphones to get into their WhatsApp accounts – wherever they are. Once the update goes live for everyone it’ll give users the choice of logging into their accounts through an email verification code, rather than requiring the account holder’s primary cellphone to be standing by. 

“Per my last email…”

Per WABetaInfo’s report, beta testers have begun receiving the feature in the latest WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.24.10 update, though those on either the 2.23.24.8 or 2.23.24.9 updates can get access too.  

If that’s you, you can find the new “Email address” section in WhatsApp’s Settings > Account > Email address. Hit all the keys in the right order and you should be getting a link sent to you in the mail. Click it, follow the instructions, and voila – your WhatsApp and email should be linked.

Read More: WhatsApp keeps the updates rolling with multiple accounts and disappearing voice notes

It’s worth noting that email verification isn’t killing off cellphone verification. Users will have the choice to use their email address or cellphone number to log into a new device, though WABetaInfo does mention that a user’s cellphone number “still remains the unique identifier for your account and a fundamental and essential way to log into your WhatsApp account.” 

Even if you don’t have plans to use the messenger’s email verification system when it launches, preferring the current method, we’d recommend still becoming acquainted with it to help prevent the loss of your account when a phone is lost/stolen. We don’t have any exact dates for when that’ll be, though WABetaInfo reckons the public rollout will be happening “over the coming weeks.” 

Source

Whether you’re a work- or personal-Gmailer, it doesn’t matter. We’ve picked five of Gmail’s best features we’d forgive you for not knowing about – mainly because Gmail itself doesn’t tell you about them.

Keep those emails on Snooze

Much like your morning alarm clock, one of Gmail’s better features involves snoozing emails to better clear your head until you’re in the correct headspace to deal with what Karen from Accounting keeps throwing your way. It’ll temporarily remove an email from your inbox, and reappear at a time of your choosing, allowing you to clear your head and focus on what’s really important.

• To snooze an email, hover over it and click the clock on the far right of the mail as it appears in your inbox. It’ll offer a choice of presets – like for 18:00 that day, or the following weekend – that sort of thing. Beneath those, however, is a button that’ll let you choose a specific time and date for the email to show up in your inbox again.

Templates for repetitive messages

If saving time is on your mind, Gmail has a feature that’ll change the game: templates. If you’re constantly hitting the same keys over and over again, create a template that you can refer back to and edit the minor bits to make it feel brand-new.

• First, compose the mail you want to keep in your Gmail locker. Once it’s just how you like it (including the subject line), click those three dots at the bottom right (next to the bin icon), then choose Templates > Save draft as template > Save as new template.
• P.S. – Templates must first be enabled in your Gmail settings. At the top right of your screen, click the Gear icon and select See all settings > Advanced. In the Templates area, click ‘Enable’ and save your changes at the bottom of the screen.
• P.S.S. – Templates are only usable in the Gmail web app, and cannot be accessed through the mobile app.

“Wait, you can unsend emails?”

There’s no better time to notice an error in an email than after it’s been sent. Whether it’s a spelling error, forgetting to CC your boss, or CCing your boss when you weren’t supposed to – it doesn’t matter. The result is the same: panic. Fortunately, Gmail has an Undo feature that’s saved more than a few lives (and jobs) in its time.

• Once you’ve hit Send on a mail, look at the bottom of your screen for the ‘Message sent’ notification. Right next to it is the ‘Undo’ button that you’re so desperately searching for. Be warned, you’ll only have five seconds to hit that button before your mail is irretrievably sent.
• You can, however, extend that window to 30 seconds. To do so, click the Gear icon at the top right of your screen and select ‘See all settings’. From here, search for the ‘Undo Send’ section. Click the dropdown menu, and choose the ‘30’ seconds option.

Google confidential

Sometimes, the contents of an email are for the eyes of its recipient, and nobody else. Unfortunately, you can’t always be sure it won’t be forwarded into the wrong hands or passed around the office like some sick joke. That’s where Confidential mode comes in; to stop people from forwarding, downloading, copying, or printing an email you’ve sent. There’s even a self-destruct timer, to make sure the email deletes itself from the recipient’s inbox when the time is right.

• To start, compose a new mail. Scan the bottom of the Compose body field and hit the little padlock symbol to toggle Confidential mode on/off. From there, choose the time and date you want the mail to expire.
• For an added level of security, you can set up an SMS passcode that’ll send a link that users must use to open and view the email. Make sure you enter the recipient’s phone number and not your own.

Keep track of your emails

Worried that you’re being left on read by someone on your contact list? Fret not, Gmail’s add-on marketplace has several options that’ll let you know if your emails are being opened and read. There are plenty to choose from, each with its own accompanying features that’ll most help you. We like the look of ‘Mailtracker & Mail Merge for Gmail’.

• To install an add-on, click the big ‘+’ on the right-hand side of your screen. From there, search for ‘Mailtracker & Mail Merge for Gmail’. Click install, and follow the prompts that appear on your screen.
• Some add-ons require you to include another extension through the Chrome Web Store to work as advertised.

Now, the arms race between spam blockers and spam senders is about to escalate with the emergence of a new weapon: generative artificial intelligence. With recent advances in AI made famous by ChatGPT, spammers could have new tools to evade filters, grab people’s attention and convince them to click, buy or give up personal information.

As director of the Advancing Human and Machine Reasoning lab at the University of South Florida, I research the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing and human reasoning. I have studied how AI can learn the individual preferences, beliefs and personality quirks of people.

This can be used to better understand how to interact with people, help them learn or provide them with helpful suggestions. But this also means you should brace for smarter spam that knows your weak spots – and can use them against you.

Spam, spam, spam

So, what is spam?

Spam is defined as unsolicited commercial emails sent by an unknown entity. The term is sometimes extended to text messages, direct messages on social media and fake reviews on products. Spammers want to nudge you toward action: buying something, clicking on phishing links, installing malware or changing views.

Spam is profitable. One email blast can make US$1,000 in only a few hours, costing spammers only a few dollars – excluding initial setup. An online pharmaceutical spam campaign might generate around $7,000 per day.

Legitimate advertisers also want to nudge you to action – buying their products, taking their surveys, signing up for newsletters – but whereas a marketer email may link to an established company website and contain an unsubscribe option in accordance with federal regulations, a spam email may not.

Spammers also lack access to mailing lists that users signed up for. Instead, spammers utilize counter-intuitive strategies such as the “Nigerian prince” scam, in which a Nigerian prince claims to need your help to unlock an absurd amount of money, promising to reward you nicely. Savvy digital natives immediately dismiss such pleas, but the absurdity of the request may actually select for naïveté or advanced age, filtering for those most likely to fall for the scams.

Advances in AI, however, mean spammers might not have to rely on such hit-or-miss approaches. AI could allow them to target individuals and make their messages more persuasive based on easily accessible information, such as social media posts.

Future of spam

Chances are you’ve heard about the advances in generative large language models like ChatGPT. The task these generative LLMs perform is deceptively simple: given a text sequence, predict which token – think of this as a part of a word – comes next. Then, predict which token comes after that. And so on, over and over.

Somehow, training on that task alone, when done with enough text on a large enough LLM, seems to be enough to imbue these models with the ability to perform surprisingly well on a lot of other tasks.

Multiple ways to use the technology have already emerged, showcasing the technology’s ability to quickly adapt to, and learn about, individuals. For example, LLMs can write full emails in your writing style, given only a few examples of how you write. And there’s the classic example – now over a decade old – of Target figuring out a customer was pregnant before her father knew.

Read More: Be gone spam: WhatsApp working on way to automatically block spam calls

Spammers and marketers alike would benefit from being able to predict more about individuals with less data. Given your LinkedIn page, a few posts and a profile image or two, LLM-armed spammers might make reasonably accurate guesses about your political leanings, marital status or life priorities.

Our research showed that LLMs could be used to predict which word an individual will say next with a degree of accuracy far surpassing other AI approaches, in a word-generation task called the semantic fluency task. We also showed that LLMs can take certain types of questions from tests of reasoning abilities and predict how people will respond to that question. This suggests that LLMs already have some knowledge of what typical human reasoning ability looks like.

If spammers make it past initial filters and get you to read an email, click a link or even engage in conversation, their ability to apply customized persuasion increases dramatically. Here again, LLMs can change the game. Early results suggest that LLMs can be used to argue persuasively on topics ranging from politics to public health policy.

Good for the gander

AI, however, doesn’t favor one side or the other. Spam filters also should benefit from advances in AI, allowing them to erect new barriers to unwanted emails.

Spammers often try to trick filters with special characters, misspelled words or hidden text, relying on the human propensity to forgive small text anomalies – for example, “c1îck h.ere n0w.” But as AI gets better at understanding spam messages, filters could get better at identifying and blocking unwanted spam – and maybe even letting through wanted spam, such as marketing email you’ve explicitly signed up for. Imagine a filter that predicts whether you’d want to read an email before you even read it.

Despite growing concerns about AI – as evidenced by Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple founder Steve Wozniak and other tech leaders calling for a pause in AI development – a lot of good could come from advances in the technology. AI can help us understand how weaknesses in human reasoning might be exploited by bad actors and come up with ways to counter malevolent activities.

All new technologies can result in both wonder and danger. The difference lies in who creates and controls the tools, and how they are used.

• John Licato is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Director of AMHR Lab, University of South Florida
• This article first appeared on The Conversation

Shortwave’s new AI feature is run by OpenAI’s GPT-3 and is available for free on all platforms. However, the AI-powered update is still in beta as the company cleans it up. Shortwave says it tested the new feature on simple emails to basic newsletters, all the way up to scanning multiple emails in a short period of time.

Read More: ChatGPT creator OpenAI releases a tool that identifies if something was written by an AI

A typical email summary would let you know “what it is about, who is involved, and what action needs to be taken,” says Shortwave.

Smart Summaries excel at untangling complex threads. Maybe the subject matter is full of complicated terminology, or maybe it’s in a different language altogether. It should still pull together something that makes sense to you (and doesn’t take much time to read).

It’s also a great jargon buster. It’ll summarise emails with complicated terms into simpler language that’s easy to understand. For example, it renders legal and scientific terms into paragraphs that don’t require several years of law school to comprehend.

“This is just the first step towards something much larger for the future of Shortwave – and the future of email,” notes the platform in a blog post.

Source: TechCrunch

Maybe this is how they keep the 11 Herbs and Spices a secret?

Sending a confidential email is easy. It can be done through both the desktop site and the Gmail mobile app. First up is the Desktop process. Sending confidential emails requires you to turn the setting on for each message. Keep that in mind.

• First things first – compose a new mail.
• After typing up your secret recipe, look for the lock symbol at the bottom right and tap it.
• A pop-up has appeared! Here, you’ll be able to choose when the email is deleted. There’s an option for 1 day; 1 week; 1 month; 3 months or 5 years.
• Underneath is the Passcode section. If you’d like to beef up the security more, you can. Select the ‘Select passcode’ – which sends a code to their cellphone. The code needs to be entered before the email can be opened. Or, you can select ‘No SMS passcode’ to skip that layer altogether.
• Hit send.

And that’s it. You’ll see a mini-popup at the bottom of your screen confirming that the confidential mail did indeed send.

Read More: If you haven’t already chosen to use the new Gmail UI, you’ll soon have to choose not to

“You got games on your phone?”

The steps for the mobile app are near identical to those on desktop, barring a few settings that are moved around.

• Compose a message.
• Tap the three dots near the top right of your app. Find ‘confidential mode’ and click it.
• Same as desktop, you can choose the desired amount of time before the email self-destructs. There’s also an option to send a passcode to the receiver of the mail, same as before.
• Hit send.

As with the desktop version, you’ll be notified once your confidential message has been sent. Now you can go about your day stress-free, knowing your private emails are safe.

Source: The Verge

If you encounter a problem with the following steps on your Workspace account, you can ask your admin to help you change the settings. The error will look as follows:

In this case, it’s in their hands. If you’re still working on your own, though, here’s how to go about it. The process is… very specific.

How to turn on Gmail offline

1. Google Chrome is the only browser that supports Gmail offline. Download it on your computer. Your phone is not the correct weapon here.
2. It does not work in Incognito mode. You’re checking emails, there’s no shady stuff here.
3. Go to Gmail Offline settings or enter the following link: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/offline
4.  Check the box that says ‘Enable offline mail.’
   
5. Choose your preferred settings for when you’re offline. For example, how many messages you want to sync to your inbox.
   
6. Remember to click Save Changes.
7. You can now bookmark this page or use the link mail.google.com to access Gmail offline.

Google says that when you send emails offline, your email goes into a new ‘Outbox’ folder. These are sent as soon as you reconnect. Yay for offline productivity, and all that. But if you’re fed up with doing all that extra work when the lights are off, and want to deactivate offline Gmail, you can do so in the following steps:

How to remove Gmail Offline

1. On your computer, open Google Chrome.
2. At the top right, click Settings.
3. At the bottom, click Advanced.
4. Under Privacy and Security, click Content Settings and then Cookies.
5. Click See All Cookies and Site Data and then ‘Remove all’.
6. Go to Gmail offline settings.
7. Uncheck “Enable offline mail.”

Et voila! It’s gone. But it’s a nifty option to keep on, just in case you want to clean up your inbox while you wait for the power to return. Stranger things have happened.

Source: HT Tech

Give yourself some more time to undo sending emails

You may know that Gmail gives you a 5 second window to unsend emails. This can be lifesaving, for example, when you type out a message giving your boss a piece of your mind and then hit send instead of delete. But 5 seconds is not a lot of time, particularly when you’re paralyzed with shock after realizing what you’ve done.

Well, in the General settings (to get there just click on the little gear icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Then click “See all settings”) of Gmail’s desktop site, head on over to the “undo send” setting. There, you can increase your grace period from 5 seconds to 30, giving you plenty of time to get over your panic and undo your mistake. Phew!

Tidy up your labels

Spam, drafts, scheduled, trash, chats, snoozed, important… Gmail has labels to spare. You’re likely to only interact with emails in a handful of these labels, with the rest just becoming background clutter. To tidy this up, check out the “labels” section in Gmail’s desktop settings. You can then pick and choose which labels you want to see, and which you’d rather keep hidden.

Do two things with one click

Replying to emails and archiving them go hand in hand. Once you’ve responded to a message, you probably don’t want it cluttering your inbox, so you archive it. Google saves you the trouble of doing these steps separately with the “Send and Archive” option in General settings. Once you’ve found it, enable the “Show ‘Send and Archive’ button”.

Now, once you’ve exited your settings, you’ll see a “Send and Archive” next to the regular “Send” button when you reply to an email. How convenient!

Get through your emails without interruptions

You know what’s annoying? Having a pile up of new emails and being forced to come back to your inbox every time you archive or delete one. Fortunately, you can change this with the “Auto-advance” option. Go to the “Advanced settings” menu in Google’s main settings window. Find the “Auto-advance” option (it’s at the top) and hit “enable”. Now, when you archive or delete a conversation, you’ll immediately move on to the next email in your inbox.

Write on a fuller screen

This one is pretty simple, but very useful. The default window that opens up every time you “compose” an email is pretty small. You can enlarge it with the arrows in the top-right of the window, sure, but if you want it to be that size every time you go to write an email, hit the three dots in the bottom-right of the window, the hit “Default to full screen”. Now your typing window will always be nice and spacious.

Save yourself some clicks

The default number of conversations on a page of your inbox is 50. Chances are, you’ve got a lot more than 50 emails backed up in your inbox, and clicking through each page is tedious. Fortunately, you can up that to 100 per page with the “Maximize page size” setting in your General settings and halve your clicks.

Set your emails to self-destruct

This is a useful little gimmick to give you peace of mind when sending out risky emails, like personal information. It lets you set emails to stay in a recipient’s inbox for a limited amount of time. It also prevents them from forwarding, saving, printing, or copying the email, and gives you the ability to cut their access time short on the fly if you want to.

Before you send your email, click the clock-lock icon in at the bottom of your compose window. Then you can select your email’s recipient and their time frame to view the email in. You also have the option to put a password on the message. Click the “SMS password” option in the “Require password” section that shows when you hit the clock-lock and Gmail will generate and send a password to the intended recipient that they’ll need to unlock the email.

Customize your swipe shortcuts on mobile

You know how you can swipe your emails to archive them on Gmail’s mobile app? Well, you can customize that swipe to do a number different things. For example, you can set it up so that swiping left deletes an email, and swiping right snoozes it. Or maybe you want your left swipe to mark an email as read, and your right to send it to your “Important” tab.

Whatever the case, you can edit this as you like in the General settings menu in the Android app, and the main settings on iOS. Head over to the “Swipe actions” section, and customize away.

So there you go. Hope you find some of that useful. Hey, while we’re talking about Google, have you heard about the feud they’re having with Australia? Crazy stuff.

Some of the other services affected include Drive, Docs, Meet, Groups, Chat, Keep and Voice, which are all experiencing service disruptions. Google has confirmed that it knows about the issues and are reporting them live on its G Suite Status Dashboard.

According to the local DownDetector website, people in Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town have started reporting issues with the services since early this morning. Reports started around 7am CAT, and have been ongoing with hundreds of reports logged locally. Globally, thousands have been complaining about the service disruption, specifically with Gmail. 

It looks like the main issue across all services is uploading of files, with people reporting that they cannot attach files to emails being the main concern right now. People are also experiencing connection errors (we experienced this in the Stuff office), as well as login issues. 

Google says that it is investigating the issues and is actively working on restoring services. “We are continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 8/20/20, 11:38 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, Posting message issues in Google Chat, Sites adding new pages issues, Keep issues, Voice mail issues,” the update from 10:38 reads.

We can’t even imagine the mass chaos that would ensue if Gmail went down and didn’t come back. So many face-to-face meetings and phone calls would need to take place, and we can’t have that right now.

Omg. I just got freaked out by the #smartcompose feature on #gmail. Just incredible and way too efficient. #ai the race is real. #google.

— Deepthi (@deepthis21) September 27, 2018

This is Smart Compose, the word-prediction feature leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) that Gmail launched in 2018. Trained on billions of data points (including yours, probably), Smart Compose’s purpose is to predict words as you type, to “help you write emails even faster while you’re on the go.”

But if there’s something truly unnerving about the spectral Smart Compose, it’s not its eerily good predictive accuracy. Its uncanniness stems from what the AI suggests we, as email users and writers, might be willing to ghost.

Email efficiency

According to Google, Smart Compose is intended to save time. The 2018 blog post that introduced the feature emphasized how time-consuming it can be to write email and, therefore, how welcome a tool to speed up the task. In October 2018, Gmail proudly announced that Smart Compose “saves people from typing over 1 [billion] characters each week.” In June 2019, this number doubled, and the “savings” were publicized on Twitter and in Sundar Pichai’s — Google’s Chief Executive Officer’s — letter to shareholders.

To all the characters out there : Smart Compose saves Gmail users from typing over 2 billion characters every week. Learn more in Sundar Pichai's Founders' letter → https://t.co/ahwwFzYREm pic.twitter.com/Rmyl5iqqmy

— Gmail (@gmail) June 20, 2019

But while Smart Compose users rave about its accuracy and Gmail promotes its time-saving superpowers, there’s a paradox to consider. Smart Compose promises to free us from the drudgery of email, but it’s actually ensuring that email never goes away.

By speedily providing predictions and eliminating keystrokes, Smart Compose claims to save users’ time. And it just might, so long as we’re talking about the speed with which we can write a single message. However, the fundamental nature of automation is this: as speed increases, so does workload. Smart Compose might succeed in paring down the time required to write a single email, but it also succeeds in increasing a user’s overall capacity.

If there’s one thing Smart Compose accurately predicts, it’s not words. It’s behaviour — not only a continued reliance on email but also (as if this were possible) even higher social expectations for swift sends and replies.

Ghost compositions

Ruminating on email’s role in everyday life may be less exciting than some of the other debates surrounding Smart Compose, but it’s no less important. Given the mental-health risks that researchers have documented around the perceived need to be constantly connected, the first question we have to ask when it comes to AI and automation is: What behaviors and outcomes do they invite?

For example, researchers at Carleton University reported that Canadians in the workplace spend nearly one-third of their work week writing or replying to email. This activity leads to high levels of absenteeism, stress and turnover.

So, what might word-prediction AI encourage by increasing email volume?

If word-prediction AI stands to keep email locked in place, it also stands to keep our eyes locked on the wrong target. Smart Compose is a case in point. Instead of addressing the high-pressure social conventions that have emerged around email, Smart Compose targets writing instead. The AI suggests that the less one writes the better.

We need to think critically through the adoption of arguably irrelevant solutions to technology problems. Not least of all, we need to think through the implications of defining writing and correspondence as activities that need to be “saved” or precluded.

A mighty digit for your digits: Smart Compose in Gmail helps save people from typing over 1B characters each week → https://t.co/z87GbxBrO2 pic.twitter.com/zyUDDpk1ba

— Gmail (@gmail) October 17, 2018

Freeing time or making work?

Marketing campaigns like Gmail’s make it easy to overlook the bigger picture. Reminding us of the brain power that goes into composition, the emoji whose head explodes with alpha-numeric characters convincingly suggests that we might be better off with word-prediction AI than we are without it. Opting for Smart Compose, according to this campaign, is simply a smarter bet. And a happier one.

But what is the broader wager?

Seen through a critical lens, Smart Compose seems to double-down on something that digital media scholar Beth Coleman has said: “‘Smart’ is shorthand for outsourcing information and responsibility … we have an opportunity at this turning point to discern between convenience (what looks like more free services) and engagement (what looks like more hard work).”

That’s something that I, for one, don’t want to see vanish into thin air.

• Crystal Chokshi is a PhD Candidate, Department of Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary
• This article first appeared on The Conversation