So true!

Gmail smart replies: they’re handy, yes, but so, so frustrating. The tone is not right. The perspective is limited. Then there is the whole notion of Google’s AI army reading through every line of every email and providing an approximation that is mostly accurate. Like in all things Big Tech, there is a bridge between surveillance and and convenience that we all walk.

Is that okay?

I just recently noticed that smart replies are showing up in Spanish too. This comes during the same week that a paper published by Google researcher launched a brave new world of possibilities connected to voice translation and transposition.

Sounds good!

Before we move too, too far from the present moment, it is worth thinking about ways that one might employ this feature in service of language learning. I can imagine a number of ways. I’ll preface this by saying that one should probably try these experiments in a closed setting. By this I mean either a class specific thread or screenshots considered offline. Anything outside this could lead to email bloat or big league misunderstandings. I’ll divide my ideas into beginner, intermediate and advanced levels.

For beginning levels:

  • Work on simple responses: Claro. OK. Vale. No hay problema. De acuerdo, De nada. Gracias. These can reinforce what students see and hear in texts and also tee up future conversations on uses of prepositions.
  • Begin to understand differences in tone, register and regional usage. For instance, how are ¡Claro! and ¡CLARO! and Claro. different? When should one use OK and when should one opt for Vale.
  • Practice verbs like gustar, specifically parecer. Me parece bien. Me parece muy bien. The use of these verbs with the indirect object pronoun, plus the confusion of parecerle (to seem) and parecerse (to resemble) cause fits for students. I hope that smart replies can help Spanish students with these structures.
  • Work on responding in a way that is appropriate and correct, towards a better understanding of snappy responses so essential for improved fluency.
  • Match responses to scenarios: Which of these three work? Why? My next step may be creating a Google Drawing template for just this purpose.

For intermediate levels:

  • Build canned responses into something more complete. Claro porque… Gracias por… No hay problema ya que...
  • Begin to think about how the recipient might read the response, expressing these ideas with simple if clauses: present indicative –> future/present indicative. “If I respond this way, then that will happen.” “If I write this, then the reader will…”
  • Think more deeply on context, register and tone. What if this is a response to a friend? A teacher? A potential employer? La Reina Letizia?
  • Being to think about pronoun case in English and Spanish. For instance, though the “It” in “It is!” is a subject pronoun, so many Spanish students erroneously translate is as “Lo es.” “Lo es” is a comprehensible clause, but it means something different. (*As a side bar, I’d love to see ¡Eso sí que es! introduced as an auto reply.)

For advanced levels:

  • This function seems to scream AP exam prep. Those familiar with the test format know that the interpersonal writing always takes the form of an email response. Students can fold these new types of responses into something even more nuanced.
  • Begin to think more deeply about how the recipient might read the response, expressing these ideas with simple if clauses: imperfect subjunctive –> conditional, and pluperfect subjunctive –> conditional perfect. “If I were to respond this way, then that would happen.” “If I had written this, then the reader would have…”
  • Use inevitable mixups to create bizarre narrative about miscommunications. Students could create a whole new subgenre of microcuentos–forking gardens of Gmail foolishness.
  • Set students up to rank the replies based on some categories they create: clearest, most enthusiastic, most open to misinterpretation, etc.
  • Use this as an opportunity to talk about neural networks, and the nature of translation. I’m a humble humanist and I’d run out of answers quickly. Nevertheless, these conversations could either inspire students to think differently about their own learning and/or understand the powers of communication and comprehension that are uniquely human…at least for now.

Looking forward to it!