The cloud applications market has seen a steady growth during the past few years, and Google shows no signs of backing off in the never-ending battle for dominance. Therefore, it only made sense that its Google Doc feature be eventually upgraded, and oh my, did they do just that.
Voice dictation is one of the things Google appears to have done really well, as it works beautifully even when it comes to transcribing more than just short messages – think long conversations or brainstorming sessions instead. But that’s just the beginning; more major features are scheduled to come out with the new release of Google Docs.
Announced on September 2, the search giant’s smart editing service will also include two new functions, Research and Explore; both of these new tools have also been partially integrated for mobile devices – they only work on Android for now.
Research handles all your searches, making it easier for you to cut and paste, so adding details – and photos – from a Wikipedia article to your paper has become a much quicker and user-friendly process.
Explore was created to help you make sense of the information that you’ve stored in the Google Sheets spreadsheet app. Of course, you’ll still have to input the data in the spreadsheets and Explore needs to know what data you want to look at, but according to Google’s statements, everything else is automatic.
PC users will benefit from these and other features as long as they use the Chrome browser, and only on Windows and Macs. But don’t expect revolutionary changes. Google has been clear that this is an overdue update that includes evolutionary features designed to improve flexibility and the range of options.
Google Docs has been endowed with a new set of templates and some new themes that should help you personalize your basic spreadsheets, documents, and slides.
Google has also thought of developing a feature aimed at the education market, and that’s how the “Share to Classroom” extension has come to Google Chrome. The feature could also prove useful for other group situations where everyone needs to be looking at the same web page at the same time.
With similarly important applications in the corporate world, Google’s updates in voice transcription could prevent several uncomfortable and inconvenient scenarios. It’s true that not everyone types well, and in many cases communication is hindered by typing. But voice dictation has never really been an option, until now.
It’s only a fairly recent development to have accurate computer voice recognition, and Google has managed that with the help of neural networking models that are said to be the best in the business.
Image Source: Cloud Sherpas