In Chicago, IL, 25-year-old Sophie Danes is finding that Gmail’s auto-generated reply options are not quite capturing her style of writing utterly deferential and self-effacing emails.
Yesterday, when a co-worker emailed Sophie asking when to schedule a meeting for next week, Gmail reportedly suggested three options: “I can do Monday.” “Let’s do Tuesday!” and “I’ll let you know.”
According to Sophie, however, none of these suggestions are usable as-is, because they are way too assertive, get straight to the point, and lack the excessive humility which is her trademark emailing style.
“Yeah, none of these replies are really doing it for me,” Sophie told reporters. “There’s not even a hint of imposter syndrome or hesitation in these. It just doesn’t sound authentic.”
“I personally would’ve gone with something like, ‘How would Monday sound to you? If not, I could do Tuesday from 2-3pm or Wednesday afternoon after 2pm? Please let me know if that works!! :) All my best, Sophie Danes,’” Sophie said. “Where’s the auto-reply for that?”
Last week, Gmail reportedly suggested that she reply to her boss’s email with either a “Sounds good.” “Sounds good!” or “Great.”
Although the only information she needed to convey was that it did indeed sound good, she reportedly couldn’t bring herself to send such a curt message.
“It would’ve been super obvious I just used the one-tap auto-reply instead of writing anything out myself, which is too bold of a power move,” she said. “It just wouldn’t be on-brand.”
Sophie reportedly clicked the “Sounds good!” template, and then spent a few minutes editing it so it read: “That sounds good! Saturday seems great. See you then!”
“There we go!” she said. “Nothing like a little personal touch to make it sound so meek that it really feels like me.”
Recently, Sophie has been calling for Gmail to create tools that better serve the needs of extremely shy email-writers.
“While machine learning has come a long way, the engineers at Google need to do better,” she said. “Here are some tips: Change every ‘can’ to ‘could.’ Automatically add an ‘if that’s okay with you’ at the end of every email. Replace every other period with an exclamation point. At least that’s what I would suggest, I’m obviously not an expert.”
