Google developed a new technology that auto-generates comment replies for YouTube creators. It will help creators to reply to comments much quicker and consistently.
According to reports, Google has been working on this technology for four years. Google is calling the technology SmartReply. SmartReply uses artificial intelligence to auto-suggest responses to messages in places like YouTube, Gmail, and Andriod.
SmartReply feature is coming to YouTube Studio
The new feature, SmartReply, will exist in YouTube Studio and is currently available to English and Spanish-speaking creators. Rami Al-Rfou, Google research scientist, said the company is looking to release the feature with “more languages in the future.”
In Al-Rfou’s post, there is a graphic that shows three auto-generated options to respond to a viewer who is thanking a creator. The answers are: ‘Same here!’, ‘Thank you too!’, and ‘More to come!’
Developing authentic replies
Al-Rfou said that it is harder to develop this kind of technology for YouTube than other mediums like Gmail. Emails tend to be longer and much more formal. YouTube comments are much more complex. People use slang, inconsistent usage of punctuation, and lots of emojis. SmartReply looks to make the suggested responses more informal and fitting for the YouTube community.
“Our goal is to help creators, so we have to make sure that SmartReply only makes suggestions when it is very likely to be useful,” Al-Rfou says. “ Ideally, suggestions would only be displayed when it is likely that the creator would reply to the comment and when the model has a high chance of providing a sensible and specific response. To accomplish this, we trained auxiliary models to identify which comments should trigger the SmartReply feature.”
You can learn more about the feature by reading Al-Rfou’s post.