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Gmail gets new updates for its 15th birthday

Tech news 1 April 2019

CAPE TOWN – In celebration of its 15th birthday today, Gmail announced that it will be launching new updates to the app such as improving Gmail’s Smart Compose function and it will be adding the option to schedule emails.

Jacob Bank, Director of Product Management at G suit said in a statement: "Today, as we celebrate 15 years of innovation in Gmail, we’re excited to announce new features that promise to bring even greater efficiency and assistance."

The first new feature that it has updated is its Smart compose feature.

First introduced by Google in May 2018, the feature suggests ways to finish sentences in emails.

In the new updated version, Google states that it “can now adapt to the way you write,” matching your individual writing style.

"For example, if you prefer to greet your teams with a friendly, “Hey team,” it can help you stay true to your voice. It can even suggest a subject line based on the body of the message you’ve written," said Google in a statement.

Google added that the Smart Compose feature has saved people from typing “over 1 billion characters each week” on the web and that the feature will now be available on Android devices and coming to iOS devices “soon.”

The next new feature the company is adding is the ability to schedule messages via email.

When typing an email, just next to the send button, an arrow is there and when clicked it will bring up a schedule which can be used to select which day or time you would like to send the message.

In the aim of making email more "dynamic, interactive and actionable", Google added other features such as the ability to respond to a comment thread in Google Docs, schedule a meeting, or fill out a questionnaire—right from within an email.

"This makes it easier to stay focused on the task at hand since you won’t have to open a new tab or leave your inbox. We’re also making it possible for info within an email to be kept up-to-date, so the content is always accurate no matter when you look at it," said Google in a statement.

"We want to thank you for taking this journey with us and we look forward to making email even smarter and more useful for you," said Google in a statement.

Written by: Gabriella Steyn

Guzzle Media