How to turn off Gmail's Smart Reply feature
Smart Reply is a feature on Gmail that uses algorithms and machine learning to suggest replies to emails to users of the service. The main idea behind it is to speed up the time it takes to reply to an email by selecting one of the suggested answers so that you don't have to type it.
The feature is available on desktop and mobile versions of Gmail. Suggested replies are short, e.g. "working on it", "Let's do Monday", or "Thanks a lot", and if you have contacts on Gmail that make use of the feature quite a bit, you may have received short auto-generated answers regularly already.
There are two main points of criticism when it comes to Smart Reply. The first is that the answers that it provides are short so that you won't save an awful lot of time when you use the feature. You may need to add more text to the message in many cases so that Smart Reply does not speed things up too much in most cases.
The second issue is one of privacy. To provide answers, Google's algorithms need to scan the email to decipher topics and generate replies based on what is being discussed. Google stopped scanning emails for advertisement purposes in 2017 but algorithms like Smart Reply rely on the content of the email to provide suggestions.
The feature returns suggestions for some email conversations only and not all conversations. It seems to work best for emails that include questions, e..g. "should we meet on Monday or Tuesday" but even those are not covered 100%.
Turning off Smart Replies on Gmail
Google launched a new Gmail web interface update in 2018 that introduced some features of Google Inbox and made design changes next to that. One of the changes introduced on the desktop was Smart Reply. Unlike on mobile, where users can turn off Smart Reply off by going to Settings > General and removing the checkmark from "Show suggested replies when available", no such option was provided for desktop users.
Google promised to do better, and the new option has arrived now on Gmail for the desktop.
Here is how you turn off Smart Replies on desktop Gmail:
- Load https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#settings/general in your web browser.
- If you are not signed-in, sign-in to your Gmail account.
- Scroll down to the Smart Reply setting.
- Switch to "Smart Reply off".
- Scroll all the way down and select "Save changes".
The Smart Reply feature is turned off after you make the change.
Tip: you may also turn off Smart Compose there. The feature analyzes text as you type and displays auto-complete suggestions. Just switch to "Writing suggestions off" on the same Settings page to turn the feature off as well.
Closing Words
Smart Reply is a controversial feature to speed up email replies. While it may work for some users and types of email, it is probably not uber-useful for most users or conversations that happen on Gmail.
Gmail users who don't make use of the feature should consider turning it off in the preferences on the site.
Now You: Do you use Smart Replies or a similar feature?
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!