At Google I/O back in May, Sundar Pichai announced a new Smart Compose feature for Gmail. With Smart Compose, the company's e-mail service can suggest context-aware ways to finish a sentence, saving the user a few keystrokes. Since the announcement, the feature has only been available in English, and it can only be accessed by using Gmail on the web, but that's about to change.
Today, in addition to all the hardware announcements, Google said that Smart Compose will be adding support for Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian over the coming months, bringing it to a much wider audience. And, for those who e-mail on the go, the feature will be coming to mobile devices starting with the Pixel 3. Other phones will also be able to use the feature, but broader availability is only planned for sometime next year.
Phones do seem like the devices where users are more likely to want to speed up the typing experience, so this transition makes sense. While on the web version, you'd press the Tab key to accept a suggestion, the mobile Gmail app will let you do so by simply swiping right on the text box.
Google says Smart Compose is already saving users from typing one billion characters each week, and this expansion should only serve to increase those numbers. However, as often happens with Google, some may worry about how much data the company is collecting to enable such features.
