Google introduced spell check in Google Docs seven years ago, and now it has announced that it will be using machine translation techniques for grammatical errors, with grammar suggestions in Docs. G Suite Basic, Business and Enterprise customers will start to see inline, contextual grammar suggestions in their documents as they type, just like spellcheck.
If you’ve made a grammar mistake, a squiggly blue line will appear under the phrase as you write it. You can choose to accept the suggestion by right-clicking it. Since this feature is built right into in Docs, you don’t have to rely on third-party apps to do the work. Because grammar is typically harder to tackle, Google is using machine translation to build a model that can incorporate the complexity and nuances of grammar correction.
Using machine translation, Google will be able to recognize errors and suggest corrections as work is getting done. The company worked closely with linguists to decipher the rules for the machine translation model and used this as the foundation of automatic suggestions in Docs, all powered by AI. By doing this, machine translation techniques can catch a range of different corrections, from simple grammatical rules to more complex grammatical concepts.