Google Celebrates Gmail’s 15th Birthday with a Feature-Packed Update
Last updated June 14, 2021
- Gmail turns 15, and Google brings some new AI features to celebrate its birthday.
- Android users will get “Smart Compose”, which will also support another four languages.
- Two more features that have landed are the support of AMP, and the “Scheduled Email Delivery”.
On April 1, 2004, Google finally launched its free email service called “Gmail,” and many have thought of the announcement to be part of an April fool’s joke. For Google, it was one of their most successful projects to date, receiving continuous development, updates, major redesigns, and feature enrichment. Gmail has already surpassed one billion active users since 2016, and it’s marching with poise towards a bright future. Today, Google celebrates Gmail’s 15th year of success, and besides internal wishes and external “thank yous”, they are bringing in a couple of new features for the people to enjoy.
image source: blog.google
Starting with a serious boost in artificial intelligence, the “Smart Compose” features of the platform will get even smarter, learning more about the specific ways with which we express ourselves and suggesting things that are somewhat out of the box. Google uses “Ahoy” and “Ello, mate” as examples of this versatility, but you can get the idea. In addition to getting smarter, the “Smart Compose” will also support four new major languages, namely Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and French. Finally, the AI features will land on all Android devices, and soon on iOS as well. Previously, “Smart Compose” was only available to Pixel 3 users, so the new version will make many millions happier.
For those of you who haven’t been using Gmail’s smart compose features, they help you type email messages quicker by suggesting a natural sequence based on what you are writing. Especially in the use case scenarios that involve smartphones, the speed improvement through this machine learning feature will be significant. Google claims that by accounting the web-based platform users only, over a billion characters are saved from getting typed each week.
Two new features that will arrive on Gmail universally are the “Scheduled Delivery”, and the “AMP interactivity”. We talked about the latter last week when Google decided to roll the support of their Accelerated Mobile Pages to Gmail, so you can read more about what this is all about in our post. The scheduling feature enables you to set a specific time (and date) when your message should reach the recipient, something that was not possible before, at least not without using a 3rd party app. This feature is useful for a whole host of possible scenarios, but especially for when trying to avoid interrupting someone, or when knowing what time is the least likely for your message to get lost among many others.
Are you happy with how Gmail evolved throughout the 15 years since its launch? Let us know of your opinion in the comments below, and share your thoughts with our online community, on TechNadu’s Facebook and Twitter handle.
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