Autocomplete
Also called Smart Compose, predictive text, AI suggestions
AI that suggests your next words as you type in email, messages, search boxes or code; a tap or the Tab key accepts them.
Autocomplete is the quietest form of AI most people use, and the oldest. Before chatbots, it was finishing search queries, suggesting the next word on phone keyboards and completing sentences in email.
It runs on the same idea as a chatbot, just smaller and faster: given what you've typed, predict what's likely to come next. A chatbot keeps going for paragraphs; autocomplete stops after a few words and waits for you.
That's useful and a little sly. The suggestion is the most common way to say something, so accepting it again and again makes your writing more like everyone else's. In code, a suggestion can look right and be subtly wrong. Treat it as a guess, not a recommendation.
For example
You type "Thanks for sending" and Gmail offers "this over" in grey, so you press Tab and move on.
Put it to use
Where you'll meet autocomplete in ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, how to use it there, and the mix-up most people make.
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