Don’t know the difference between “affect” and “effect”? How about “there” and “their”? Google Docs has your back.
Google on Tuesday announced that an artificial intelligence-powered grammar suggestion feature it first introduced at July’s Cloud Next conference is now generally available to all G Suite customers.
The web giant first introduced spelling and grammar check in Docs seven years ago, but this new feature takes things a step further. Using machine translation techniques, Docs can now catch tricky grammatical errors it wouldn’t have been able to detect in the past and offer suggested corrections.
Not sure whether to use “a” or “an” in a sentence? Can’t remember how to use subordinate clauses correctly? This new feature can help.
“‘Affect’ versus ‘effect,’ ‘there’ versus ‘their,’ or even more complicated rules like how to use prepositions correctly or the right verb tense, are examples of errors that grammar suggestions can help you catch,” G Suite Product Manager Vishnu Sivaji wrote in a blog post.
G Suite Basic, Business, and Enterprise users will see the new grammar suggestions inline as they type. When you make a mistake, you’ll see a blue squiggly line under the offending phrase. To accept the suggestion, just right-click it.
“We worked closely with linguists to decipher the rules for the machine translation model and used this as the foundation of automatic suggestions in your Docs, all powered by AI,” Sivaji wrote. Google’s online office suite, Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, earned an “excellent” rating in PCMag’s review and shares our Editors’ Choice for online office suites with Microsoft Office 365.