We Put Google's New AI Writing Assistant to the Test

When I asked Google's AI writing aid to draft a happy birthday email to a friend, it left my brain in the dust. I had taken about 90 seconds to craft a decent 81-word greeting. But the search giant's text-generation feature knocked out a flawless 87 words in a third of the time. That's exactly what Google wants to see. The Help Me Write feature that launched in March and was rolled out more broadly at the company's annual conference last week is a radical step beyond the Smart Reply and Smart Compose tools that Gmail has offered for years to generate short phrases.