Google Announces New G Suite Features, Including Smart Compose For Docs

Google is bringing several intelligent Gmail features to G Suite customers using Google Docs, including the Smart Compose feature — the AI-powered technology that the Silicon Valley giant rolled out for Gmail users last year.

The company announced the news at Google Cloud Next ’19 UK.

The feature is currently available for G Suite administrators and end users, but not for personal Google accounts. Once a domain is accepted into the beta, the feature will be on by default, but users have the option to write their own documents.

At the conference, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said the new feature will make the modern worker more productive and make collaboration with coworkers easier.

In a blog post, Google said the feature will help users compose high-quality content in Google Docs faster and more easily, save time by cutting back on repetitive writing, reduce spelling and grammatical errors and suggest relevant contextual phrases.

For now, the feature is only available in English.

According to Google, Smart Compose has already saved people from typing more than 2 billion characters each week since its launch in September 2018.

Docs will start using cutting-edge, neural network technology to power grammar suggestions. That approach has been proven to help people catch more errors in internal experiments, Google said.

An autocorrect function is also being brought to Docs, which will use Google Search and AI to learn new words or phrases that become part of the English language from search to inform spelling suggestions in documents, similar to what it already does in Gmail.

Further, Docs suggestions will be tailored to your business and Docs suggestions will be made based on commonly used words from your business domain. Google said an internal project name or acronym would not only be recognized as a valid word, but Docs would suggest corrections if it was misspelled.

“Because of these advances, 5 million companies pay to use G Suite,” Kurian said. “We have over 1 billion people using Drive and 1.5 billion people every day using Gmail. You could be one of them.”