Build 2019: Word integrates ‘Ideas’ to improve writing with AI insights

First PowerPoint, then Word... Ideas marches on

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(Image: Microsoft)

Last year, Microsoft brought artificial intelligence to PowerPoint with Ideas, a tool to suggest improvements to presentations. Now Redmond is adapting Ideas to Microsoft Word, offering ideas to enhance your writing as well.

Although Word already corrects misspelled words and suggests changes to your grammar, Ideas goes a bit further. Not only does the service summarise the word length and how long it will take to read your document, it also looks more closely at your language, suggesting more appropriate words when appropriate. Ideas also looks at language to make sure it is appropriately gender-inclusive. Microsoft announced the changes at its Build developer showcase in Seattle.

Ideas continues to evolve how Office taps artificial intelligence and collaboration to improve further. It was not so long ago that Office documents lacked real-time autosaving to OneDrive. Earlier versions of Word included Office Insights, which taps Bing for more context on a given word. Now, Word not only allows real-time collaboration and editing via the cloud, Word’s new Ideas feature will automatically send e-mails to colleagues asking for assistance.

Mary Votava Sheppard, a senior product marketing manager at Microsoft, explained how. By essentially writing yourself a note, Word will add a note to your To-Do list, assuming you have it enabled. If you “at” someone else – such as writing ‘@JoeSmith’ before a piece of text, Word will send an e-mail to the appropriate person, including the context of the quote, and ask that person to follow up.

IDG News Service

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