From the beginning, Google designed G Suite to enable admin assistants and office professionals to harness the power of AI. Google Cloud Platform’s goal for G Suite is to use AI and machine learning to enhance these employees’ jobs, help them be more productive, and actively contribute to their organizations’ business goals. Here are five of the most recent AI-driven enhancements to G Suite:
Google Docs Grammar Checker
Google’s AI-powered grammar checker for Docs recently rolled out to all G Suite business users, where it is enabled by default. While grammar checkers have long been a staple of word processing solutions, the new Docs grammar tool is underpinned by the same machine translation technology utilized in Google’s other linguistics projects, including Google Translate. Google wanted to build something that could go far beyond recognizing the difference between “you’re” and “your.” The idea was to build a tool that could “translate” incorrect grammar into correct grammar the same way Google Translate translates, for example, English into Spanish.
The Docs grammar checker was developed by a team of engineers, working in conjunction with computational and analytical linguists, with two decades of research in machine translation to draw upon. The team spent months developing ML models that could learn highly complex grammar rules, such as those governing verb tenses and prepositions.
The result is a new tool that helps Docs users improve their writing by analyzing their sentence structure and semantics in real-time to uncover inconsistencies or mistakes and offer suggestions. Because the tool employs machine learning, it is capable of learning industry-specific terms and colloquialisms, and Google will continue to use feedback from users to refine it going forward.
Smart Compose for Gmail
Smart Compose goes a step beyond the Docs grammar checker. The tool, which was trained using billions of phrases and sentences written by Gmail users, analyzes what a user has written in real-time and suggests text to complete their sentences, reducing the need for repetitive writing and the possibility of making a spelling or grammar error. Because it uses ML algorithms, Smart Compose learns a user’s writing style over time and tailors its suggestions to make them sound more natural. Google is continuously improving the suggestion quality of Smart Compose and is working to incorporate personal language models to more accurately emulate each user’s individual writing style.
Smart Reply for Hangouts Chat
Smart Reply scans incoming email text and suggests quick, natural language responses, such as “I’ll be there” in reply to a request for a meeting or “Thanks; I’ll look it over” in response to a colleague sending a document for review. This time-saving feature is a natural fit for Hangouts Chat, where it determines which messages most likely need responses and provides up to three suggestions.
Significantly Expanded Cloud Search App
In today’s fast-paced workplaces, electronic files need to be at employees’ fingertips, retrievable at a moment’s notice. One of the ways Google seeks to solve this problem is through Quick Access for Google Drive, which uses AI and ML to analyze a user’s activity in drive and predict which files they may want to open next. But what if an employee needs to quickly find a lone file that was generated weeks or months prior?
Google has taken all of its research and resources as the undisputed king of internet search and poured them into the Cloud Search app, which seamlessly integrates with G Suite. The app uses natural language processing (NLP) to allow users to search for documents using natural language phrases, such as “my last meeting” or “docs edited by Tony.” In addition to being able to search all of G Suite, Cloud Search has been expanded to support third-party data sources, including Windows and SharePoint intranet files and MySQL and Oracle databases.
Explore for Docs, Sheets, and Slides
Explore is a set of AI tools for Docs, Sheets, and Slides that enables users to easily derive actionable insights from spreadsheet data, design highly polished presentations, and cite sources when writing reports.
Explore for Sheets
Explore for Sheets is both a fantastic time-saver and a helping hand for the math-phobic. Similar to Cloud Search, the tool utilizes NLP to let users ask Sheets to crunch their data in plain language. Instead of having to manually write mathematical formulas, users can ask questions such as, “How many teddy bears were sold on Valentine’s Day?” or “How many new users signed up last month?”
Explore for Slides
Explore for Slides allows anyone to develop a professional presentation with no muss, no fuss, and no graphic arts expertise required. As users work, Explore analyzes the slide’s content and automatically makes design suggestions, which can be implemented with a simple click of the mouse. Explore even takes care of image cropping, resizing, and formatting, so users don’t have to worry about images being pixelated or spilling off the page. Google states that Explore can shave 30% off the time it takes to format presentations, allowing users to focus on content instead of graphics.
Explore for Docs
Office professionals must frequently back up claims made in blogs, white papers, business cases, and other business documents with data from third-party sources. As users write, Docs analyzes the text in real-time and suggests related topics, additional content, and images from both Google Drive and the web. Users can perform searches and add images, charts, and additional information right from Explore, without ever leaving Docs, reducing time spent clicking between applications and tabs. Users can cite information as links or automatically formatted footnotes.
