Hot on the heel of WhatsApp’s announcement that it has surpassed one billion monthly active users, Google announced that Gmail has done the same, which makes it the seventh Google service to reach a billion users after Android, Chrome, Google Maps, Google Play, Google Search, and YouTube. To put into perspective how many users that it, that means that about one-in-seven human beings on the planet use Gmail on a regular basis. In reality, a significant number of Gmail’s users have multiple accounts, which means that there aren’t necessarily a billion Gmail users, just a billion accounts.
As part of the company’s Q4 2015 earnings report, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company’s massively popular email service Gmail has passed the 1 billion user mark. This is active, monthly users, not just downloads or sporadic users. This means that if you’re a human being reading this news article, then there’s at least a 14 percent chance you’re a Gmail user. This isn’t the first time a Google service has netted over a billion users. There are six others: Search, Chrome, Android, Google Play, Maps, and YouTube can all boast this claim. There’s no question that Google is a large part of many of our lives, and our handing over this much data to the company is potentially fuelling their artificial intelligence research. AI is increasingly being used in the search giant’s services, including Gmail. In fact, in the same announcement, Pichai revealed that an astounding number of all replies on their email service are written by AI technology. Back in November, we covered how Inbox reads your emails and uses AI algorithms to generate “smart replies,” which are canned replies written using your own diction. Apparently, the smart reply system has seen an incredible adoption rate, as 10 percent of all email replies coming from the mobile app are composed this way.
