Nice! Thanks! Love it! Gmail’s auto-reply is perfect for the lazy emailer

Google's mail app now offers a range of AI-generated responses. Is modern life about to devolve into one long Turing test? No thanks!

Confusing times at Google. The company has announced it will stop automatically scanning users' emails in order to provide targeted adverts. At almost the same moment, though, it has decided to launch an auto-reply system that scans one's emails and generates possible responses from which you can choose.

The new functionality, added to the app store versions of Gmail, works by analysing a large, anonymised body of emails to generate possible responses. Machine-learning systems then rank these to pick the "best responses to the email at hand".