Android Wear 2.0 uses offline AI for its smart replies

One of the new features on Android Wear 2.0 is Smart Reply, which suggests responses to messages that you can quickly tap if you're busy doing something else. In its research blog, Google explained that the feature uses on-device machine intelligence, so it works even if you don't have an internet cloud connection. While the researchers initially thought doing that would be impossible, the "Expander" AI team saw it as a unique opportunity. "[We] returned to the drawing board to design a completely new, lightweight, machine learning architecture -- not only to enable Smart Reply on Android Wear, but also to power a wealth of other on-device mobile applications," the team wrote. It tried using current neural net tech and so-called graph learning, but the models didn't fit on a smartwatch and attempts to limit the number of replies "did not produce useful results," they wrote.