Jira now offers smart replies in work items

[#1]

Acknowledging work or starting a conversation in Jira has just become faster and easier.

Say hello to smart replies!

With the touch of a button, you can add a comment to a work item and instantly save it, or use it as a starting point to type more details before saving:

Work smarter, not harder

Jira’s real superpower lies in collaboration. By encouraging your team to respond to work and comment on work items faster and more often, smart replies can help your team embrace Jira’s unlimited power of accelerated collaboration.

After being positively received by a group of customers, this feature has just been rolled out to everyone. We will continue to polish it, and improve the experience.

What smart replies would help you respond to work items faster? Let us know in the comments below.

Premium & Enterprise customers

If you're a Premium or Enterprise customer utilizing Jira's AI feature, you'll discover supercharged, AI-powered smart replies. The smart reply buttons act as prompts for AI to draft more detailed comments and conversation-starters for you.

Disabling smart replies

If you don’t want to use a smart reply, simply start typing in a work item's comment box, and the smart replies will disappear.

To disable the feature, admins can go to Settings > System settings > Edit settings, and select 'Off' next to Smart replies. (See the support doc here.)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Hannah McKenzie 

How may customers on a free license level disable this feature for their entire site when they cannot submit a support ticket to Atlassian?  I noticed community posts about this potential need as soon as the experimental version of the smart reply comments started appearing a few weeks ago.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Hannah McKenzie]

Hi @Bill Sheboy, I'd suggest hiding it for each person's individual view in the case of a Free instance. 

 Ask each of your 10 users to:

1. Go to Settings (top menu).

2. Select Personal Jira settings.

3. Make sure you’re in the General section.

4. Disable the smart replies toggle within the Jira labs section.

Please reach out if you experience any problems, or have any questions.

[Yatish Madhav]

Thanks @Hannah McKenzie - this is awesome. I know canned responses is available on JSM projects. But it would be awesome to add some more configuration to this specifically like:

• adding custom smart replies as admin or as end users
• ability to enable or disable site/org wide
• adding gifs as smart replies

Thanks for this, again

[Andreas Kemper]

@Yatish Madhav 
You are absolutely right.
The pre-defined responses do not work for us. 
As long as it is not possible to edit these responses we'd like to have the chance to disable this feature org wide. 

[tristan.cruickshanks]

Personally, my opinion of these "Smart" replies is that they encourage pointless updates that provide no real benefit to the actual status/progress of the work.  The addition of the "This is blocked" is especially concerning as it does not automatically  'flag' the issue for attention, combine this with "Need Help" and "Can you Clarify" are useless without further context and tagging appropriate people.  I regard these 'Smart' replies as 'Helpers' rather than providing a quick total reply.  I was surprised to see we had no option to opt out of this update, at least that is what I was told.  I have to educate squads now not to solely use the "This is Blocked" option now, as it misses existing filters on boards and dashboards, unless they also flag the issue and provide more context (in other words continue with existing method combined with this), otherwise it may be missed. 

[tristan.cruickshanks]

^ To Add further we could set up an automation when comment contains exact 'Smart' reply text then add a Flag to the issue ... but it might be a bit hit and miss

[tristan.cruickshanks]

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Jira-articles/Jira-now-offers-smart-replies-in-issues/bc-p/2821039#M15684  -- Hi @Hannah McKenzie  this is not a good solution when you have many users with various Jira knowledge..  A admin (org wide) option would be far more effective.

[Rick Westbrock]

How many customers were asking for this feature? The canned replies in the example image are all no more than 3-4 words so how much time will it really save anyone, especially if they have to click to horizontally scroll to see all the options?

[Hannah McKenzie]

Hi @Yatish Madhav @Andreas Kemper, we are currently building the capability for admins to disable this feature for their instance. In the meantime, it is still possible to disable this feature for your instance by contacting Atlassian Support.

The concept of custom smart replies is a great suggestion, which may get added to our roadmap for future iterations of this feature.

[Hannah McKenzie]

Hi @tristan.cruickshanks, the automated flag idea is an awesome suggestion, and may be added to our roadmap for future iterations of this feature. We're currently building an option for admins to disable this feature. In the meantime, instances on Standard, Premium or Enterprise can contact Atlassian Support to have this feature disabled for the whole instance.

[Hannah McKenzie]

Hi @Rick Westbrock, thanks for reaching out. Smart replies are designed to offer a friendly prompt for teammates to begin a meaningful discussion in Jira, especially for people who may not be aware that they can have those sorts of discussions in Jira. We definitely hear your feedback though, and will keep it in mind as we continue to iterate on this experience. It's possible to hide smart replies from your view (please see instructions above).

[Peter Slížik]

Well, this is probably one of the most useless features in Jira. I can always type 'Need help?' if I need it, but this 'feature' consistently takes up screen real estate. And not only on smaller displays.

[Jacques]

I'm not sure what this feature helps in optimizing content to a ticket. Seeing that the number of permitted comments on a ticket is limited, and wanting to have useful comments in a ticket, I don't see this helping any of that. A Jira issue is not social media where you can add "smart comments", or type unhelpful text in the context of the post. Comments in a ticket should have some content and context. Either you add a comment with some explanation to clarify whatever the issue is, or you request for more help, or you mention people that might be interested in following the ticket. 

[Bill Sheboy]

Here is the suggestion to make this "feature" configurable or to disable it completely for a site:

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWCLOUD-27235

[omrili]

@Hannah McKenzie - does the option to reply to a specific comment configurable or not supported at all?

[joachim ramberg]

I don't really see any value in this for me. Still waiting for threads in comments, that would be something!

[Alexander B]

So on a personal note from a developer that uses Jira, I find that this feature is completely useless:

• It distracts from the actual use-case that I want to do: Write a comment
• It's extremely awkward when you have a bug where some describes that something is broken and the first "suggestion" you get is: "🎉 Looks good!". This helps no one.
• Other issue-management products don't have such a function

[Douglas Fernando Smarsi]

Uso palavras chaves como "#Aproved" e "#Failed" para disparar automações dentro do jira, e seria de grande ajuda ter como configurar isso para usar como comentários rápidos.

[Dominic Miller]

This is an awful feature.  It provides no value whatsoever.  Why on earth did Atlassian think this was a good idea?  Please, please, please remove it or an least give the option to remove it.

[James McLellan]

The only thing I like about this feature is the ability to disable it in my account. Why in the world do these prompts - none of which are valuable for the work I do in my Jira instance - take up so much space in the comment box that it's almost impossible to get around them to manually type in a reply?

[Thomas Altrogge]

This is so useless and annoying!  Especially if you use the notification bell a lot and click on the issues you end up straight in an open comment-field with not fitting reply options. 

It would be all fine if we could easily switch it off. But even with help of the support it disappeared only briefly and is now back, even if the Option is "off" in the Settings.

Atlassian should introduce new features with an opt-in setting, so the admins dont have to spend their time to remove unwanted and not asked for settings.

[Rafa]

Yet another example of time spent on a useless feature nobody asked for, while there are hundreds of features people have been requesting for many years...

[Dominic Miller]

@Hannah McKenzie Based on the comments above no-one likes this feature! So I'm curious to understand what you're going to do about it?

[Justin Parmar]

@Hannah McKenzie , 
It would be really great if there is an option to add a custom template or response in smart reply.

Use case: My dev team needs to add a comment that they have performed unit tests on their local system. Team uses a predefined tabular format that they need to fill in. The Table contains columns like test performed, site on which the test is performed, impacted area etc.

can I use this feature to quickly print that predefined table in comments?
   

[Markus Stobbs]

I'd need Smart Replies to have configurable replies in order to use this feature. Or just add JSM's Canned Responses feature to Jira Software which is what I'd really want.