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Google Docs and Gmail are now going to be bilingual when it comes to grammar. That’s based on recent reports originating from an announcement made by Google on the matter. As might be expected from such an announcement, the big change here is the addition of Spanish language support. Specifically, that support is being added to Google Docs and Gmail when it comes to suggested corrections to grammar.
That means, summarily, that users who are typing in either English or Spanish will now see suggestions in the appropriate language.
For clarity, this is Google’s AI-driven feature for identifying and correcting homonyms and correct tenses in writing. It was first added for English back in 2018. Users who have already utilized this feature in English will recognize the feature like the one that highlights problematic grammar via a squiggly blue line. Now, both English and Spanish errors will be highlighted.
Users simply need to right-click — two-finger click or alt-click on Chromebooks — highlighted errors to take advantage of the tool. Doing so causes a box to appear where users can preview changes and implement them.
Aside from Spanish grammar in Docs and Gmail, what else is incoming?
Beyond the addition of grammar suggestions in Spanish in Google Docs and Gmail, Google has a few other bilingual changes planned for the future too.
Building on a plethora of incoming changes over the past few months, and the new suggestions, Google also plans to introduce autocorrect and Smart Compose in Spanish.
Autocorrections are, of course, self-explanatory. With that enabled for Spanish, users typing in that language will see some more common changes happening automatically. That’s without the above-mentioned action required. Autocorrected errors appear with a gray squiggly line after they’ve been corrected.
Smart Compose, conversely, is arguably a bigger deal. Smart Compose is Google’s AI-powered tool that allows users to automatically type out phrases or finish them with a quick tap of the space bar or on the screen.
In effect, it acts as a task-shortening feature that automatically helps users respond to emails or type out sentences. That’s based on their own use of language too, allowing the feature to infer how the user would respond and make natural-sounding suggestions accordingly. That chiefly works in Gmail, and the addition of Spanish isn’t going to change that. But it will help Spanish-using Gmail users across the board to type out their emails a bit more quickly.
Google says those two changes will arrive later on in 2020.
When will you see this update arrive?
Now, the rollout timeframe — as with most Google updates — is going to be 15-days from today. That means that users may have to weight up to two weeks before the new bilingual suggestions begin appearing in Google Docs or Gmail. The update appears to be entirely on the server-side. So users won’t need to update anything to take advantage of that.
Unlike some other updates though, this is one update that’s going to hit everybody. So it won’t matter if users are paying G Suite subscribers or not. They should still receive this update.
