Google celebrates Gmail's 15th anniversary with smart updates

Google announced Monday new features to Gmail on the mail service's 15th anniversary, pledging to make it more efficient and helpful.

This March 23, 2010, file photo shows the Google logo at the Google headquarters in Brussels. [File photo: AP/Virginia Mayo]

Tom Holman, senior product manager of Gmail, said Google wants to make its top mail service more assistive to its 1.5 billion users across the world today.

He said Gmail is updating Smart Compose, an artificial intelligence-powered feature that helps users write emails quicker. The new feature enables Gmail to adapt to the way users write an email by suggesting the most appropriate, possible words or sentences based on the user's habits in composing an email.

He said the feature has helped save "people from typing over 1 billion characters each week," almost the amount of 1,000 copies of "Lord of the Rings."

Smart Compose comes in more languages to include Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese and is available on Android phones. A similar feature will be expanded to iOS systems for iPhone users soon, Holman said.

Gmail also introduced the feature of scheduling mails for a more appropriate date or time. After users write an email, they can simply hit the "Schedule" button to decide at which time the email will be sent.

Holman said the feature is helpful for people working across time zones or who don't want to interrupt the happy time of vacation of an email recipient.

Lastly, an updated feature enables Gmail users to improve their efficiency by allowing them to respond to a comment thread in Google Docs or browse hotel recommendations directly within emails.

Google launched Gmail service on April 1, 2004, with its powerful built-in Google Search feature and 1GB free data storage capacity for each user, which Google claimed was nearly 100 times more than other email providers could offer at that time.