Last year, Microsoft brought artificial intelligence to PowerPoint with Ideas, a tool to suggest improvements to presentations. Now Microsoft 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 summarize 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 your language to make sure it’s appropriately gender-inclusive. Microsoft announced the changes at its Microsoft Build developer showcase in Seattle on Monday.
Microsoft
Ideas for Word summarizes your document and improves the language.
Ideas continues to evolve how Office taps artificial intelligence and collaboration to improve further. It wasn’t 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 emails to colleagues asking for assistance.
Microsoft
If you “@” someone using Ideas for Word, here’s what the recipient will receive.
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 email to the appropriate person, including the context of the quote, and ask that person to follow up.