JOANNA SMITH: With almost 500 sessions at Next 2018,
it's understandable that you couldn't get to them all.
So if you didn't see enhancing productivity
with assistance in G Suite, then stay tuned
because here's the rewind.
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I'm Joanna Smith, and I picked this
rewind because my number one focus this year
is replacing tedious tasks with clever solutions.
And that is what these guys are here to talk about.
This talk had three awesome speakers.
It begins with Tom Hallman, a senior product manager
for G Suite intelligence, as he sets
the stage for how Google is using
machine learning internally to help us build better products.
The basic idea here is that ML is the sort of tool
we are building into every aspect of our company,
and this actually started a while
back with a simple experiment with Smart Reply in Gmail.
And that led to a much greater initiative
with helping users to become better writers and not
simply auto correcting what they write.
Tom ends his prelude by announcing
two awesome new features, Smart Compose in Gmail and Grammar
in Docs.
And at this point, Paul Lambert, the product manager for Gmail,
comes out to talk about Smart Compose.
Of course, with announcements like these,
you expect a cool demo, but since this tool
is so incredibly simple to use, that only took about 8 seconds.
So with the rest of this time, Paul
presents something much more interesting, in my opinion.
He walked the audience through the entire creation process
for Smart Compose, how the team began with Smart Reply, where
users could choose one of three pre-written responses, how they
plugged into the service that can auto complete your Google
search queries, and how unstructured language is
apparently way more complicated than search queries.
And then he goes into some really cool depth
on the iterations and the various design
looks they tested before settling
on the type of head style you can use in Gmail today.
This walkthrough of the future development
and how the team tackled the ambitious task before them
is the kind of insight that makes the conference talk stand
out from a blog post, which is my job.
So if you're interested, flip over to the recorded talk.
But I've still got one more piece to rewind.
After Paul stepped off stage, it was Vishnu's turn.
As a product manager for Google Docs,
Vishnu Sivaji gave us an overview of a Grammar for Docs.
Similar to Paul's approach, Vishnu
provided a lot of really cool context to this new feature.
They had another ambitious goal--
to improve collaboration and communication between users
without turning technology into a crutch.
Rather, this team wanted to help users improve
to become better writers.
They started with the existing spelling correction
that was built into G Suite, which
is great because it is already a context-aware feature.
It knows you probably meant to type "I'll" even
though "aisle" is a valid word.
Grammar is a much more complex and subjective issue
than spelling.
Fun fact-- it's so subjective that the team building
the feature couldn't even agree on grammar rules.
So they took a different approach
and decided to apply machine learning to translation.
But instead of solving the problem
of translating between two languages,
they solved the problem of translating
within one language, from incorrect to correct.
And after another round of design experiments,
we ended up with a feature that can help
writers improve in two ways.
As you write, contextual suggestions
will appear with blue underlines.
But if you prefer to write first and then revise,
there's an overall spelling and grammar
check that walks you through the suggestions.
So these three speakers provided a truly interesting inside look
behind two major writing improvements in G Suite.
If you'd like to see the full talk,
check out the link in the description below.
And don't forget to subscribe to the Cloud YouTube
channel for more great Next Rewind content.
Thanks for watching.
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