Google is making Gmail better at giving grammar corrections and detecting typos — and in some cases, even autocorrect certain words outright.
The Mountain View company is using artificial intelligence to make this possible, and if that seems familiar, it's because it also brought a similar feature to Docs back in February.
Gmail Gets Smarter
Google made the announcement in a blog post, providing GIF samples to show what to expect from the new feature.
Now Gmail's improved spell-checking know-how and better grammar suggestions are coming to all G Suite users, and when they do, these should start appearing in the form of inline suggestions, meaning they'll show up as users type out an email.
Squiggly red lines will appear under words that the AI thinks are misspellings, while blue squiggly lines are for words that are deemed to be grammatical flubs. For instance, using Google's example, the word "nex," a typo for "next," is highlighted by a red underline, and in the sample sentence "Note that I will be away from the office next weak" had the word "weak," which is supposed to be "week," highlighted by a blue underline. Users can then click on them to approve a suggestion or not.
As the company puts it, Gmail also has an "as-you-type autocorrection" for "common spelling mistakes." Again, using the example from Google, the misspelled word "acommodate" was automatically corrected to "accommodate," with a temporary underline appearing to show users that the feature just made an autocorrection.
Disabling The Feature
These corrections and suggestions will be set to on by default, but when corrections are more of a distraction than helpful, they can be turned off.
To do this, just go to Settings in Gmail, click on General, and disable Grammar, Spelling, and Autocorrect.
The new feature is rolling out gradually to all G Suite users, and it's expected to be available to everyone between Sept. 12 and 15.
