Google Inc. is applying its artificial intelligence technology to not only prevent spam emails but also as an email reply tool for users, a company engineer said Wednesday.

Google said its machine learning model can ferret out spam and phishing messages with 99.9 percent accuracy, even spam that are carefully crafted to deceive people,

"Our goal is to make Gmail the most productive email in the world," said Paul Lambert, Google's product manager.

Defining five main threats to Gmail as malware, account hijacking, phishing, web attacks, spam, the engineer said Google aims to keep users safe.

The new system uses an AI-based neural network to analyze and flag the suspicious messages, especially those written specifically to subvert simpler filters.

Google estimates up to 70 percent of messages in Gmail's inbox are spam, Lambert said. If an email looks suspicious and heads to a person's inbox, Gmail will delay it and analyze the message to make sure it is not a phishing attempt.

Starting in May, Google also began applying machine learning-based "Smart Reply" to its Gmail, which automatically writes quick responses to a user's email message.

The feature scans the text of an incoming message and suggests three basic responses the user can send. The feature, currently only available in English, will be available in Spanish and other languages soon, the engineer said.

"Gmail makes you efficient, save time and avoid repetition," Lambert said, adding that the company strives to provide additional services for South Korean users.

In terms of some worries over possible privacy invasion, the Google official said the company takes the privacy issue very seriously.

 "We only take a large data set (from emails), and no humans are ever able to read the data," he said. (Yonhap)