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Gmail in G Suite Now Uses AI For Inline Spelling and Grammar Suggestions (venturebeat.com) 25

Ever been stumped by spelling or sentence syntax while pecking out an email to colleagues? Fortunately for G Suite users, Google will soon introduce improved spelling and grammar correction tools in Gmail that offer corrections as you type. From a report: Starting August 20 for rapid release domains and September 12 for scheduled release domains across all G Suite editions, Google will begin applying AI to make real-time spell-check suggestions while detecting potential grammar issues. For some common spelling mistakes, it'll also add "as-you-type" autocorrection for improved accuracy. The inline grammar suggestions are a carryover from Google Docs, which gained them back in February 2019. Squiggly blue lines appear under erroneous phrases as you write them, and right-clicking on them accepts or dismisses the corrections. The Mountain View company says its engine can handle basic cases like "affect" versus "effect" and "there" versus "their," in addition to more complicated rules like how to use prepositions correctly or to pick the right verb tense.
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Gmail in G Suite Now Uses AI For Inline Spelling and Grammar Suggestions

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  • Does this mean we'll finally see an end to those endless (and endlessly irritating) ads for Grammarly on YouTube videos?

    If so then this is a good thing!

    • That was my first thought too. How does a spell checker even generate enough money in 2019 to constantly run ads on like every other video?

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • As someone with dyslexia, this isn't a problem of paying attention and studying harder. Going threw school taking hours to write a one page paper, not because I didn't know the content, but trying to express the content, and have it spelled correctly and use the correct grammar is a massive chore. I had to work my butt off for every paper, essay and Theseus. To make it passable, and still I will get 10-20 points taken off for spelling and grammar mistakes. While other students who had a loose concept of

      • by isj ( 453011 )

        I had a colleague once (also programmer) who was mildly dyslexic. When he wrote draft documentation and the word processor made red lines under words he would chose the first suggestion because he had no clue what the right one was. When the documentation department then had to incorporate his texts into the official documentation they were almost in tears because they had to reverse the damage the spell checker had done.

        I do hope that most dyslexics realize that if they don't have a clue then the spell che

        • I have a brother-in-law who typically chose the first MS Word suggestion when writing college papers. Proofreading his work was both a chore and source of hilarity.

  • by dwarfking ( 95773 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @12:30PM (#59109500) Homepage
    So spell check and syntax check, which have been in word processors like Office for decades, is suddenly AI driven?
    • by taustin ( 171655 )

      In a perfect world, the AI could tell, from context, the difference between, say, their, there and they're, instead of letting you (or making you) spell the wrong word correctly.

      We do not, of course, live in a perfect world, only in a world of hype for half-baked ideas recycled from the 80s.

    • by geek ( 5680 )

      Google can't innovate anymore so they have to rely on buzzwords like AI, something that doesn't actually exist

    • Google's grammar AI is total bullshit and I wish they'd turn it off.

      Ever since they announced AI grammar/spelling for Android, my phone corrects "were" to "we're" and "its" to "it's", regardless of the context. Unless you constantly fight with it, it makes you look like an uneducated dumb-ass.

    • So spell check and syntax check, which have been in word processors like Office for decades, is suddenly AI driven?

      The AI is now necessary in order to collect user data to be evaluated towards your social credit score and throw flags upon the detection of certain keywords and phrases.

      Fuck, I wish I was 100% joking.

      Strat

  • by OneHundredAndTen ( 1523865 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @12:37PM (#59109522)
    I have had access to such things in different tools for a long, long time. Well before the current AI hype cycle got under way.
    • The spell and grammar check in Office is done locally on your computer.

      The spell and grammar check in G Suite is presumably being done on Google's servers. Meaning if your company is composing and hosting "private" company documents using G Suite in lieu of Office, that Google not on has access to them but is also having its computers scan and parse them. That was a big concern with companies using G Suite [google.com].

      I suppose it's possible Google implemented this in the web client of their G Suite site (doesn
  • by KeithIrwin ( 243301 ) on Wednesday August 21, 2019 @01:02PM (#59109608)

    Having used their grammar checking in Google Docs for the last while, I'm unimpressed. It does catch legitimate grammar errors, but the fact that it's just recognizing "normal" based on some corpus of data means that it also repeatedly flags simple completely grammatical things as ungrammatical because it's a mildly less common usage that's similar to a common one. The most obvious example of this was when I wrote "She shut the car door" and it suggested that I meant "She shut the car doors" instead. But it's not only that, it suggests "gotta" frequently in place of the phrase "got to". It suggests that I change things to contractions. It hates having extra descriptive words in verb phrases: it'll suggest changing wording like "The light went right out" to "The light went out".

    It hates the phrase "had had" and always suggests just changing it to "had". It frequently suggests other verb tense changes for no obvious reason, usually suggesting changing a more complex tense like future perfect into a simpler one like future, but sometimes just changing tenses from past to present or vice versa for no obviously reason. And it sometimes even suggests ungrammatical things because it's mostly looking at sentence fragments rather than whole sentences, so sometimes when one of your clauses has to be worded with a certain tense because of its place in the larger sentence it'll suggest changing that to a simpler tense even when that simpler tense is ungrammatical. So a sentence like "By the end of the next week, I will have read five books" it might suggest changing to "By the end of next week, I read five books." (That's just an example, of course, and that particular one might work fine. but it's sentence like that that it frequently provides grammatically incorrect suggestions on.)

    I've reported all of these sort of problems, of course, but nothing's changed and nothing's likely to as their application of machine learning to this problem precludes any sort of actual active debugging or fixing. The best they can do is change their corpus and try again, but it's likely to still have many of these same problems because it conflates commonness with correctness. So hooray! Crappy AI-based grammar checking everywhere!

    • by WallyL ( 4154209 )

      That's what makes it "AI." It does not accept basic training inputs and instead acts as a black box with nebulous operations before returning some unintended output.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Grammar checkers haven't improved much since the 90s when I started using it. :(

      • Grammar checkers haven't improved much since the 90s when I started using it. :(

        Grammar checkers haven't improved much since the 90s when I started using them.

        FTFY, unless you forgot the /sarcasm tag. Real-time grammar checking is both a blessing and a curse.

        ---

  • web browser plugin for all sites is better!

  • Hopefully this is something that can be turned off. While a spelling checker may be nice, it is important that it actually be able to spell first -- and many of them are rife with spelling errors.

    Secondly, grammar checkers are useless. I have never met one that is worth a pinch of coon-shit. They all failed Grade 2.

  • "Ever been stumped by spelling or sentence syntax while pecking out an email to colleagues? "

    Not since I got Grammarly, before, definitely.

  • by Rei ( 128717 )

    For all intensive purposes, it's a mute point as to whether Google does this; people will mess up their grammer and speling irregardless.

  • "Gmail in G Suite Now Uses AI For Inline Spelling and Grammar Suggestions"

    What if the word doesn't contain an A or an I?

FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

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