LinkedIn Adds Smart Replies to its Messaging Features

Online business and employment networking service LinkedIn has added smart replies to its messaging features.

The company which has been in the middle of a long-term makeover of its social tools is unveiling this feature to give users prompts with different phrases to use while they are chatting to keep the conversation flowing.

The feature is launching in English first in LinkedIn’s mobile app and on desktop. LinkedIn says that it plans to roll it out to more languages sometime in the future. And users can opt out of the smart reply feature in their settings.

Similar to Google’s feature of the same name, LinkedIn’s Smart Replies will surface up to three suggested replies for messages that come through your inbox. So if someone asks you to meet with them, you could see Smart Reply suggestions for “what time,” or “sure.”

The company says these suggestions will improve and become more personalized over time, so they’re more relevant to the way you speak, and more customized to your interactions. (You can also opt-out of it entirely.)

While the feature stands to make it easier to clear out overflowing LinkedIn inboxes faster, it’s also the latest way the company is making good on its promise to infuse its service with more artificial intelligence in the wake of Microsoft’s acquisition.

Smart replies may sound familiar to you for a couple of reasons. The first of these is that LinkedIn itself has been trying out a version of suggested replies since January of this year, and was actually already talking about its plans on this front months before that.

The key difference in today’s news is that the company is now using more AI tools like machine learning and more sophisticated natural language processing to be able to understand the gist of a conversation and how to help keep it going.

The second reason why smart replies might sound familiar is that earlier this year, Google expanded its own version of the feature, also imaginatively named Smart Reply, which had first made its debut in its AI-infused Inbox app, into its much more ubiquitous Gmail app.

There are multiple reasons behind why LinkedIn, Google and others are working on ways of making it easier and faster to reply to messages.

Perhaps the biggest of these is that they help get more people using their messaging services. Messaging apps (and that includes email messaging) have become the most valuable property on smartphones these days as a hugely popular way for people to communicate to each other, encroaching on phone calls and other native phone features.

LinkedIn itself realized this years ago and has been trying to improve its messaging experience ever since.

But although there are some definite hitches in the world of touchscreen typing, in general it can be a pain to compose messages on smartphones and tablets (and for some it’s a pain on regular keyboards, too). It’s all the more so when the messages are mundane interactions.

Predictive phrases and words aim to kill those two birds with one stone, by making the most obvious/typical replies into one-tap buttons, phrases that you can use as a starting point that you can edit after inserting them, or just leave them as they are.

The other area that’s interesting here is how LinkedIn is trying to do a lot more with artificial intelligence. As AI represents the new wave of technology, LinkedIn is making sure that it stays in the loop to use it where it can for  products it builds.