Wow!
If you have any sense of humor you have to see what Google has come up with now!
As many of you know, you can set your Microsoft Outlook to have an automatic out of office reply. I will detail some tips on how to do that in a second. However, how great would it be to have an automatic, politician like, non-committal spin generator for when you are out of the office, instead?
Leave it to the Geniuses at Google to add this feature to Gmail! Talk about an office productivity booster, instead of feeding ads off the text of your email, they simply create a logical answer to the email. They use business intelligence data mining to calculate what would be a logical reply, based on the billions of answers that go through Gmail.
To personalize it they ask for more information or things about the person’s life, based on previous emails you have had with this person. Then they also randomly interject some cool snippets about your life, mixed in with how the weather is in your area. To top it off, they will throw in your opinion about President Obama, based on your political and RSS news feeds.
To avoid the embarrassing, “oh lets chat about that!” bombshell. Google scans all the major IM providers to see if the person is online. Once they pop offline for 20 min, Google will send the automated “you don’t know I’m out of the office” reply. For those friends who are like, never off line, it will send the message randomly between 1 and 3 am in the morning your time, adding a final touch like, I have got to get some sleep!
Oh and do not forget to leave a comment or trackback about what you think about this new feature!
It is in limited beta, so you have to click the terms at the bottom before Midnight tonight April 1st 2009.
As promised, check out the following links on how to set your real out of office reply in Microsoft Office.
How to Set Up an Out of Office Vacation Auto-Reply in Outlook
Demo: Automatically reply to messages while out of the office - Outlook - Microsoft Office Online