Love Communicated

“The early iterations of Smart Reply were overly affectionate. ‘I love you’ was the machine’s most common suggested response. This was a touch awkward: because the model has no knowledge of the relationship between an e-mail’s sender and its receiver, it provides the same suggested responses whether you are corresponding with your boss or a long-lost sibling. “The team was really puzzled about this,” Gawley said. ‘It turns out that our internal testers are very affectionate and that I love you is a very common thing for people at Google to say.’”