Microsoft is taking on rival Grammarly with a new feature in its Word software, using AI to suggest writing improvements beyond simple grammar and spelling corrections.
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 each user’s own writing style.
The computing giant announced the changes at its Microsoft Build developer showcase in Seattle on Monday.
Although Word already corrects misspelled words and suggests changes to grammar, Ideas summarises the word length and how long it will take to read the document.
It also looks more closely at language, suggesting more appropriate words and gender-inclusive phrases.
“Ideas follows along as you write and provides intelligent suggestions to make your writing more concise, readable, and inclusive. It can even use machine learning to suggest a rewrite for a tricky phrase. Ideas will also help when you’re reading documents by providing estimated reading times, extracting key points, and decoding acronyms using data from the Microsoft Graph,” the company explains.
