Google’s new feature cannot stop saying “I love you”

It must be love. Or at least a heart emoji. Either way, it seems that predictive text is all about that lovin’ feeling.

So, we told you earlier this week abut Gmail’s new feature that will allow the service to send or begin email responses for you. It would be super helpful…If the feature could stop confessing its love to all our e-mail contacts. If you’re felt a little creeped out by its excessive feelings, fear not: apparently our future robot overlords just want to love us.

On Google’s Research blog, Senior Research Scientist Greg Corrado revealed that the new Smart Reply feature for Gmail had an unexpected bug.

“Another bizarre feature of our early prototype was its propensity to respond with ‘I love you’ to seemingly anything. As adorable as this sounds, it wasn’t really what we were hoping for,” Corrado said.

Turns out, it was a bug that needed some tweaking but wasn’t completely off-base. The program realized that short and common replies like “thanks,” “sounds good” and “I love you” would get the job done as a reply to most things.

So no, your Gmail Smart Reply is not intuiting things about a crush on your coworker/friend/your real estate person. It was simply reaching for a simple and likely reply.

Popular Mechanics points out that this is not an uncommon quirk, saying, “Swiftkey’s predictive keyboards for Android and iOS can exhibit the same phenomenon.”

Maybe smart technology is not in love with being in love yet, but after it watches Love, Actually a few dozen times this holiday season we’ll check back and see where things stand.

(Image via iStock, giphy)