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Exactly 15 years ago, Google decided to confuse everybody by launching its long-awaited web-based email client on April 1. This definitely wasn’t a joke, though, and Gmail went on to become one of Google’s most successful products. Today, to celebrate its fifteenth birthday (and maybe make you forget about today’s final demise of Inbox and tomorrow’s shutdown of Google+), the Gmail team announced a couple of new and useful Gmail features, including improvements to Smart Compose and the ability to schedule emails to be sent in the future.
Smart Compose, which tries to autocomplete your emails as you type them, will now be able to adapt to the way you write the greetings in your emails. If you prefer “Hey” over “Hi,” then Smart Compose will learn that. If you often fret over which subject to use for your emails, then there’s some relief here for you, too, because Smart Compose can now suggest a subject line based on the content of your email.
With this update, Smart Compose is now also available on all Android devices. Google says that it was previously only available on Pixel 3 devices, though I’ve been using it on my Pixel 2 for a while already, too. Support for iOS is coming soon.

In addition to this, Smart Compose is also coming to four new languages: Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese.
That’s all very useful, but the feature that will likely get the most attention today is email scheduling. The idea here is as simple as the execution. The “Send” button now includes a drop-down menu that lets you schedule an email to be sent at a later time. Until now, you needed third-party services to do this, but now it’s directly integrated into Gmail.
Google is positioning the new feature as a digital wellness tool. “We understand that work can often carry over to non-business hours, but it’s important to be considerate of everyone’s downtime,” Jacob Bank, director of Product Management, G Suite, writes in today’s announcement. “We want to make it easier to respect everyone’s digital well-being, so we’re adding a new feature to Gmail that allows you to choose when an email should be sent.”
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It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, the standard text messaging app on Google’s mobile operating system, in the coming months.
If you remember Allo, Google’s last failed messaging app, then a lot of this will sound familiar. For Allo, after all, Assistant support was one of the marquee features. The different, though, is that for the time being, Google is mostly using the Assistant as an additional layer of smarts in Messages while in Allo, you could have full conversations with a special Assistant bot.

In Messages, the Assistant will automatically pop up suggestion chips when you are having conversations with somebody about movies, restaurants and the weather. That’s a pretty limited feature set for now, though Google tells us that it plans to expand it over time.
What’s important here is that the suggestions are generated on your phone (and that may be why the machine learning model is limited, too, since it has to run locally). Google is clearly aware that people don’t want the company to get any information about their private text chats. Once you tap on one of the Assistant suggestions, though, Google obviously knows that you were talking about a specific topic, even though the content of the conversation itself is never sent to Google’s servers. The person you are chatting with will only see the additional information when you push it to them.
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Pinguin is a new app that lets you chat with people based on your interests. Really into startups? They got a room for you. Like you some programming? Right this way, sir. Like food? They got a room for you. The team, Josh Purvis, Devon Woodruff, Vijay Kumar, and Bryan O’Reilly built the app from he ground up with the needs of the online set in mind. There are a few of these apps… Read More
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Allo, the messaging app Google launched into a crowded market last September, is getting an update today. The update focuses on improved support for emoji and GIFs (because that is, after all, what the world needs), and easier access to the Google Assistant.
As far as we can tell, Allo has been anything but a hit for Google. With Hangouts, the company had a perfectly solid and competitive… Read More
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Halloween is just around the corner and if there was one horror-themed phenomenon this year, it was Netflix’s nostalgia-driven Stranger Things. Google has now teamed up with Netflix to bring a Stranger Things sticker pack to the latest version of its Allo messaging app. It’s also hosting a Stranger Things scavenger hunt in New York today (Oct. 28). The update isn’t just… Read More
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Google first announced Allo and Duo, its new messaging and video chat apps, at its I/O developer conference earlier this year. Duo launched about a month ago and today it’s Allo’s turn. With Allo, Google is combining everything it has learned from its previous messaging products with the company’s machine learning smarts. Indeed, Allo marks the first time you’ll be… Read More
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Chatbots were meh. Sure, they’ll get better. But the upcoming innovation in chat is about being more human, not less. With the proliferation of adequate speech recognition, AI assistants and wireless headphones, the tech is ready to unlock the potential of our most basic form of communication. Soon, we’ll talk and listen to our messaging apps when it’s more convenient than… Read More
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