Everyone has carefully crafted and proofread an email, only to find a glaring typo or grammatical error after hitting send. To help our fallible human eyes, Google is introducing new spelling and grammar autocorrection to Gmail.
So what’s changing? Gmail is basically getting new AI-powered spellcheck and grammar corrections. For common errors, Google is also adding autocorrection as you type. Otherwise, errors will appear as blue (grammar) or red (spelling) squiggly lines under the word.
To accept Google’s suggested correction, you just click and voilà. Google also says it’ll temporarily underline corrected changes so you can undo it. You know, for those instances in which you want to preserve more colourful language choices and clue in that duckface that you’re not talking about ducks, ducking, or their repeated duckups, they just really need to go duck themselves.
If the feature seems familiar, you might recognise it from an earlier update to Google Docs back in February.
You can read Google’s in-depth blog about the AI here, but the gist is it uses machine translation techniques to catch both simple and complex grammar goofs. In this case, the purported benefit is to account for English grammar’s quirks and nuances.
You don’t have to do anything to enable the new autocorrect — it’ll be turned on by default in Gmail. (You can turn it off by following the steps here.) Right now, it’s being gradually rolled out over the next 15 days. In the meantime, fingers crossed Gmail’s autocorrect won’t end up creating more errors than it corrects.
[Google via The Next Web]