New York — For those who regularly make TYPOS, should now rejoice… as help is just at hand for Google Docs users. One of the wonderful things about using Google for search is that you do not always have to know how to spell things properly; And now thanks to its latest update, Google Docs now offers Web-powered spell checking.
Google Search has a pretty impressive spell check in place that lets you know if you have spelled a word wrong and gives you suggestions as to what word you might have been wanting to spell. Many users’ are already all familiar with seeing something like the following when you search for a misspelled word:
In fact, search is not the only place where people make typing error, and Google used to say ‘Did you mean XXXXXX?’, but now it corrects your spelling on the fly and does the proper search for you, allowing you to click on your original search if the company got it wrong, which is how it learns and adapts.
See, when you type a misspelled query into Google Search, an adaptive, context-sensitive system appears with suggested corrections: “Our suggestions get smarter and smarter based on the words Googlebot detects as it explores the web,” according to Yew Jin Lim, a Google Software Engineer, said on the Google Docs blog.
Now, Documents will be checked for spelling errors and words that are contextually misused such as “see” and “sea” or the all-too-commonly missed “you’re” and “your.” Google Docs will now underline misused words in red.
These enhancements would certainly help Google Docs users, which is free, and just inch closer to Microsoft Office.
Hence, not only will Google Docs save your presentation from embarrassing grammar errors, it will also recognize new words relevant to pop culture and slang talk. Web crawling allows Google to search for words that may not be in the traditional dictionary.
Lim displays a few pretty impressive examples of Google’s new spell check. The first shows him typing in “Icland is an icland.” As I typed that into my text editor, both instances of “icland” are underlined and the spell check gives me three choices – Iceland, inland and island. Google states that their spell check is contextual and once it knows that the first word is Iceland, it will correct the second “icland” to “island.”
“Suggestions are constantly progressing. As Google crawls the web, we detect new words, and if those new words become popular enough they will automatically be incorporated in our spell checker–even pop culture terms, like Skrillex,” he said.
Finally, the newly released spell-checker is available in English for documents and presentations. Also, Google says it will soon roll out a spell-checker update for other languages.