What you need to know
- Google today announced changes to the comment interface of its Google Docs app.
- Now, Smart compose and autocorrect suggestions are enabled when working with others.
- Google launched smart compose and autocorrect in other parts of the Google Docs app in 2020, noting that the tool had saved over 3 billion keystrokes for Gmail users.
Google's AI and ML smarts permeate most of its products, from productivity to entertainment. Most relevantly on the former side, the company has been dabbling with smart creation tools like Smart Compose and autocorrect. There, Google uses all the data its AI has learned to help users create work faster and more accurately, helping them "cut back on repetitive writing, reduce the chance of spelling and grammatical errors, and even suggest relevant contextual phrases."
Today, this is being expanded to the comments section of the app. Google says that these changes will help users "compose comments quickly with confidence". It'll work the same way as it already does in Gmail and Google Docs, so you'll be able to tab to accept a Smart compose suggestion or you keep typing to reject it if you want. Autocorrected words will be given a light grey underline so users can go around and change it should it be a deliberate misspelling, and so on.
In 2020, Google shared that "more than 3 billion keystrokes are saved with Smart Compose in Gmail," as the feature has been expanded to more products in the intervening period, this number has likely more than doubled.
This change is rolling out now for all Google Workspace users on the Google Workspace Essentials, Business Starter, Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Essentials, Enterprise Standard, and Enterprise Plus, G Suite Basic, Business, Education, Enterprise for Education, and Nonprofits plans.
