People may be capable of typing in all full 10 fingers. But even if they can do that efficiently, rarely that they can type without making mistakes.
Spelling mistakes (typo) and grammar mistakes are the most common errors that happen when typing something using the keyboard.
Because these humanly mistakes can be catastrophe and embarrassing when they happen on corporate emails, Gmail wants to lend a hand.
The email service developed by Google is making sure that these mistakes don't happen again, or at least reduce them significantly, by leveraging AI technology to correct users automatically.
The update, initially available to all G Suite users, is essentially a machine learning-powered autocorrection.
First of, is the typo autocorrection, Google said that:
And for grammar mistakes, the AI will show a blue line underneath the erroneous phase.
This same feature has been previously made available on Google Docs starting back in February 2019.
"If you're working against deadlines to create documents daily (how’s that for alliteration?), having correct grammar probably isn’t the first thing on your mind," explained Google at the time.
"And when it is, it seems there’s almost always a contested debate about what is correct (or 'which?'). Even professional linguists have a hard time agreeing on grammatical suggestions—our own research found that one in four times linguists disagree on whether a suggestion is correct."
Typo errors can be corrected quite easily. In fact, Google has this autocorrection feature in its search boxes in various of its products for quite a long time.
However, when dealing with grammar errors, things are different.
"It’s a more complex set of rules that can vary based on the language, region, style and more. Because it’s subjective, it can be a harder problem to tackle using a fixed set of rules. To solve the problem, we use machine translation to build a model that can incorporate the complexity and nuances of grammar correction," said Google.
This is where AI comes in handy.
With the technology, Google can recognize errors and suggests correction as users type.
"We worked closely with linguists to decipher the rules for the machine translation model and used this as the foundation of automatic suggestions."
Previously, Gmail has other nifty AI features, like Smart Reply and autocomplete.
Read: Gmail Updates In Increasing Users' Productivity: A Blow To Microsoft Outlook