Services like Grammarly are trying to up the quality of your email copy, but now Google is taking some initiative itself by bringing improved spell check capabilities and grammar suggestions to Gmail. The company says that G Suite users will soon notice inline suggestions, powered by machine learning, that appear as you type out an email. And Gmail will some autocorrect “common spelling mistakes” without you having to click anything or take any extra steps. Aside from misspellings, it’ll also detect mistaken verb tense.
From the composer’s perspective, the main benefit is that you’ll no longer have to manually click “check spelling” in the compose window for Gmail to analyze your email. Instead, red lines appear under misspellings and blue lines will be under what Gmail perceives to be grammatical errors.
You’ll now see inline spelling and contextual grammar suggestions in your draft emails as you type. 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 clicking it.
When an auto-correction takes place, we’ll temporarily underline the corrected change so you can easily identify and undo the correction if you’d like.
These new options are all on by default and rolling out to G Suite users over the next few weeks. If you don’t want any assistance with spelling or grammar checks from Gmail, you can disable each of them individually in settings. So you can turn off the as-you-type autocorrect and leave on grammar suggestions, for example.
It’s just a modest improvement to the built-in assistance that was already there — now easier and a little smarter. This AI-powered grammar checker has been making its way into Google Docs, and now it’s coming to Gmail. Google notes that machine learning and, by extension, some of these suggestions have the potential to “reflect human cognitive biases,” but the company says it’s “committed to making products that work well for everyone, and are actively researching unintended bias and mitigation strategies.”
