Google Docs will soon get this biggest missing feature

With the popularity on Google Docs on the rise, an essential feature that has been missing till now is being rolled out. While there are inbuilt dictionaries to check spellings there is no native tool to check for grammar in Google Docs. For grammar checks, users had to rely on third-party applications like Grammarly. Google has announced the availability of grammar checks for its G Suite customers (especially enterprises). The public version of Google Docs too is expected to soon get the ability to check grammar by default.

Interestingly, Google's grammar suggestion will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to suggest grammatical changes and spot errors. "To solve grammar corrections, we use a unique machine translation-based approach to recognize errors and suggest corrections on the fly," said Google in a blog post. The feature would be initially available for web-based word processor and could be extremely useful to students, writers, journalists and others.

With Google Docs being always connected, Google can learn the writers style and suggest grammatical changes accordingly. "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," explained Google.

While automatic grammar correction has always been a unique feature of the new Microsoft Word release but its reliability has always been questioned. Also, Microsoft Word in not free. This is were Google Docs could appear has a better option. Talking about reliability issues, Google said, "Machine learning will help improve this capability over time to detect trickier grammar issues."