Gboard users are being fed some new features that run the gamut from big to small. The biggest out of them is that some Pixel owners are now seeing a new Google Assistant-powered voice typing UI.
Read MoreIf you're a Google Docs user in a G Suite team, you're probably still coming to grips with some new assistive writing features like grammar tips, autocorrect, and Smart Compose. Soon, those features will be adapted for Spanish drafters as well. It all starts with neural network-powered grammatical suggestions this week.
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Sitting in the cloud, Google’s productivity suite has the big advantage of background updates and feature additions that don’t require user intervention. As part of such a rollout, Google Docs is getting a couple of features that landed first on Gmail and have been tested with a limited group of users. The company yesterday announced that Autocorrect and Smart Compose are now out of beta and will be available to a broader userbase in the coming days.
Read MoreRepeating the same words makes for sub-par writing, which is why most authors employ synonyms to diversify the vocabulary they use. Even though writing is usually done on computers, a lot of it happens on our mobiles, and finding synonyms should be as simple as when you're working on your laptop. Thankfully, Grammarly's keyboard can now suggest analog words as you type, so your messages can be more remarkable than ever.
Read MoreGoogle is putting a lot of work into its keyboard, with user-facing changes occurring with pretty much every bigger release. Most recently, we've seen the addition of a clipboard manager, hints for OCR support, and a fresh look for the settings page. After the addition of these somewhat hidden features, Gboard now receives a redesigned interface for autocorrect suggestions with version 8.2 that jumps right into your view.
Read MoreApplying machine learning to everything under the sun can be tricky. Case in point: Gboard's text prediction has been suggesting people type "my face and" after the words "sit on," resulting in a reference to a sexual act. Google says it's an accident, though, and it's working on a fix for the errant suggestion.
Read MoreGoogle has been improving Gboard with the same type of tools it uses for speech recognition: machine learning. The budding technology is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous method for improving results and performance. If a network can be trained to accurately accomplish something in a performant way, odds are you'll see it introduced to any product it can be applied to. Gboard and text-input as a whole are no different, and we are reaping the benefits of improved corrections and predictions every time we swipe out a low-accuracy message to a friend. But how do these improvements work?
Read MoreWe've all mocked it plnety of times. We laughed at its silly mitsakes. We got annoyed when it sent the wrong words and put us in awkwrad situations with our boss or partner. We even blamed it for our own typos and inapporpriate messages when the recipient wasn't so welcoming of them. We ducking hated the living duck out of it when it stopped us from showing our ducking rage while typing a message and replaced it with ducking innocuous words. We witched about it at the top of our lungs. But have you ever stopped to think what Autocorerct thinks about us?
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