Google just wrapped up the first day of its three-day long Cloud Next 2018 event, which is a three-day venture dedicated to cloud-based technologies. The company made a bunch of announcements and some of were focused on its G Suite applications as well. G Suite enterprise customers will soon get to use the AI-based smart reply feature on Hangout Chats, along with Smart Compose for Gmail. The company also announced that Google Docs will now show Grammar Suggestions for G Suite customers who are a part of Early Adopter Program and voice commands will be rolled out for Hangouts Meet hardware as well.
Google’s Smart Reply feature was first introduced in the company’s Gmail and later came to Android Messages. The feature analyses the context of a conversation to generate automatic replies, which can be eerily accurate at times. The company says that the Smart Reply feature powers more than 10 percent of email replies and it is making its way to Hangouts Chat in the coming weeks. The Smart Compose is a rather new feature for Gmail, which Google announced at its I/O 2018 event. The nifty feature can be thought of as autofill suggestion for Gmail that can help users compose emails from scratch and top of that, the suggestions are personalised so that one can easily autofill information like frequently used addresses, common phrases and more. The feature is already available for standard Gmail accounts and is now rolling out for all G Suite customers.
Google Docs already comes with a standard spell check feature to help you spot those spelling mistakes. Now, the company has new ‘grammar suggestions’, which are said to “catch things like spelling and grammatical errors that inadvertently change the meaning of a sentence.” As one would guess, the feature is based on a subset of AI and uses “machine translation-based approach to recognize errors and suggest corrections.” Explaining the feature, Google says, “Our AI can catch several different types of corrections, from simple grammatical rules like how to use articles in a sentence (like “a” versus “an”), to more complicated grammatical concepts such as how to use subordinate clauses correctly. Machine learning will help improve this capability over time to detect trickier grammar issues.”
Finally, Google is working on improving meetings and is adding voice commands for Hangouts Meet hardware. Hangouts Meet hardware was announced last fall to enable organisations have reliable, effective video meetings at scale. With the new addition to the service, teams will be able to easily connect a video meeting and the feature is planned to roll out for select Meet hardware customers later this year.
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