- Google must have some awful PMs and designers. The worst UX decision I have seen recently is AI auto-dubbing all youtube videos by default with no way to disable this behavior globally. How could you miss that people can be fluent in multiple languages and if I click on a video in a foreign language, I most likely want the original soundtrack? Clearly, the intention was to boost some metric “X users are using this feature” with no regard for the actual user.
by merelysounds
6 subcomments
- Anecdotally, I don’t see any of this. I have all “smart” features in gmail turned off; there is an option like this in the settings.
Google’s Help: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15604322
Also relevant:
> By default, smart feature settings are off if you live in: The European Economic Area, Japan, Switzerland, United Kingdom
by spankalee
2 subcomments
- I've never flagged a submission before, but I just have to with this one.
There's no evidence, no blurred-out screen shot even, no one here has seen this behavior in the comments, and I can't find any corroborating reports on the web.
Who knows what's really happening or not here?
- 100% Google has been making their AI more intrusive and in your face across all their portfolio. It's not just Google, Atlassian is doing the same
With search in gcloud, the drop-down top 2/3 is ai calls to action. Completely useless because their suggestions are so bad and for such basic tasks that I never do.
It feels like in platform advertising.
I've left them feedback, and since they've only doubled down, am now reducing my spend
Moving to Cloudflare, if you're curious
- am i missing something here, or is this really just a random two-sentence gripe from some guy, complaining about something that nobody else can reproduce?
"dave is mad at gmail". okay dave.
- GMail started inserting package delivery notifications at the top of my inbox screen. Not exactly ideal for Christmas shopping with family milling about. If you turn it off, you lose the tabs for email categorization, so instead I wrote a CSS rule to hide it permanently, but it's a bad feature.
- Tangentially related, the AI integrated in Google Chat is hilariously bad. Find a thread which starts with „Bug: (…)“ that has 90+ answers. Hey, an AI could be useful here! Click summarize. Wait. Without fail the result will be along the lines of „X, Y and Z discuss a bug.“
by randerson
1 subcomments
- I've been a long-time Gmail user with a paid plan. But recently two issues are annoying me enough that I'm considering leaving:
1. The incessant "Using Gmail to run your business?" upsells. No, I'm unemployed and this is a personal account. Unlike the AI upsell, I can't seem to dismiss this permanently. It just snoozes it until the next time I open it.
2. The Search bar has become dangerously glitchy (at least in Firefox for Mac) if you type fast and have keyboard shortcuts on. It lets me type 1 or 2 characters before it starts treating every character as a shortcut, inadvertently deleting, muting, archiving emails. Search is what sets Gmail apart and now it is unusable. I reported this bug to Google months ago and my patience is running thin.
by NelsonMinar
0 subcomment
- Could use a more reliable source for this report.
I paid for and tried Google AI for Gmail and was appalled at how bad it is. The product team there is really not executing well. I've switched now to Shortwave. It works very well and having LLM+RAG queries for 20+ years of email archives has been very helpful to me.
- Something I noticed recently is that titles of youtube videos are automatically translated.
I'm convinced that nobody in Google speaks more than one language, otherwise they would have never done that. It is impossible to turn off the unsolicited translations in search, and now youtube. I'm scared that soon they will force up audio translation as well.
by MinimalAction
1 subcomments
- I can see how it is useful: for some people, reading and writing emails is a dreadful activity. But it is also an important facet of every human activity -- communication. So, it better be intentional and clear. I have turned off all smart features and let me handle how to say what I want to say.
by testdelacc1
0 subcomment
- All this AI is great. What I really want is to clean up my inbox by seeing where the mails are coming from. What I want is `select sender, count(*) from emails group by 1 order by 2 desc` or the equivalent. But I guess that doesn’t juice the stock price like AI does.
- One of my tech clients emailed me about a Roku problem and one of the AI suggestions in Gmail was to tell the customer to try unplugging a Roku for a minute and plugging it back in. I pressed that button, proofread the suggested text, and hit send.
In truth it felt both amazing and made me uneasy, for AI was encroaching on my career of telling people to reboot their errant device.
by isaachinman
1 subcomments
- For anyone looking for a cross-platform, local-first IMAP email client that "just works" and doesn't jam AI down your throat, check us out:
https://marcoapp.io
- I'll save you a click:
> Gmail doesn't just offer to write your emails for you, they actually do it, and it's up to you to delete the text it wrote.
> Hard to make a screen shot to demo without revealing personal info. That's how awful this thing is.
> It reeks of desperation.
This is the whole article. That's it. No screenshot. No details. Nothing. Just three random sentences.
200+ upvote on HN btw.
- Is there a way to suspend/disable Gmail account in a way, that no bad actors could overtake it, after Google disables/deletes(?) it after period of two years?
by david_van_loon
0 subcomment
- I've seen no indications of this supposed feature in my own experience or other sources. The article does not provide any evidence to support its claims.
by charlieyu1
3 subcomments
- A client emailed me for a meeting at Monday 2pm. The Gmail AI immediately marked Monday 2am on my calendar and it cannot even be deleted.
- You have to wonder what Gmail reports about you. Does it detect suicidal thoughts? Child sexual abuse? Antifa activity?
- Can it can help answer my questions on behalf of my clients that use gmail?
by sodapopcan
0 subcomment
- Stop using Google products.
- Where I work, we get tons of feedback from customers, basically saying, "How do I disable this new AI feature? I never asked for this." Yet, the guidance from leadership is very clear: "More AI!" I suspect it's like this at Google (and everywhere else), too.
by renewiltord
0 subcomment
- Yeah, you gotta watch out for this stuff. The other day I was using Gmail when it just gave me a million dollars. I gave it to charity under an assumed name.
Can’t screenshot without revealing the name but I think it’s actually super cool of Google to do this. Just distributed charity. With no benefit to themselves.
They did say that they did it based on my Google Photos showing that I was really good looking (can’t share because of privacy) so there’s some privacy stuff there but overall I think it’s good.
by IncreasePosts
2 subcomments
- Did the user accidentally keep hitting Alt+H? Or are they part of some experiment? Gmail writes nothing for me unless I click the "help me write" link. I also don't know why it is so hard to record a screenshot of the behavior, you can write it to example@example.com, and the draft email UI can be clipped from where it shows your email address.
- ...I'm confused, is there something I'm missing in this post? I only see 4 sentences, with almost no information.
- And yet google's spam filters still let through so much AI slop spam. Any email from a new sender should be suspect, and if it has an awkwardly phrased opt-out line ("if you'd rather not hear from me again, just shoot me a "leave out"") then it should presumptively be marked as spam.
by SanjayMehta
0 subcomment
- Most of the time I'm on IMAP for gmail et al, so I haven't seen this yet. How long before some Google PM decided to turn off IMAP access?
- Do one thing and do it well, you assholes
Be dumb pipes
Google has already arguably ruined Youtube, which they own, over a period of many, many years
It doesn't matter if the community does all the work, the company will MITM themselves to make themselves look more important than they are
by hilbert42
1 subcomments
- I'm truly thankful I deleted my Gmail account years ago and my smartphone has no account and no g-apps.
Do we have to riot in the streets before governments regulate this shit?
- Please do yourself and the world a measure of good, and stop using GMail. Giving someone a GMail address is like saying "Yes, I like to be abused, I like to be violated and have no privacy". It is quite embarrassing - and people who are tech-savvy should be telling their colleagues and peers that it is embarrassing and inappropriate.
Yes, I realize that dropping the GMail mailbox does not mean you are free from GMail, because of all of the other people on it. But we must each make some effort to chip away at that thing. Twenty years ago, when Microsoft's hold on PCs was much stronger than it is today, online venues were inundated with derision and denouncement of them and their practices; but these days - it's as though Alphabet/Google control of all these aspects of so many people's lives is just neutral reality, ho-hum, nothing to waste time thinking about.
- I’ve found the email thread summary pretty useful ymmv.
by doctorpangloss
1 subcomments
- ha ha, hey google PMs, here's a useful AI feature:
> Is this e-mail marketing something?
by shortrounddev2
2 subcomments
- I moved to ProtonMail right before their CEO started mouthing off about his dipshit opinions. I still use them because it's cheaper to pay for a family plan and get a VPN, password manager, and storage along with the email. I used to pay for each of these services individually and was paying 2x what I pay now
- This is why I am building a better AI for my inbox.
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