Microsoft is now planning to add AI-powered text prediction functions to Word. This feature has already been rolled out to 50 percent Beta users of Windows in Microsoft 365 while the company intends to offer this brand-new feature to all its users in coming days.
Writing is often an immersive task where the writer engages in an ever-enticing world of words and phrases while curating new content. Writing is quite a demanding activity that requires creative imagination of the writer along with their predictive abilities. But, with the advancement of technology even these predictive skills might now be performed by artificial intelligence.
As the scope of artificial intelligence grows and penetrates into our lives, tech giant Microsoft is planning to embed them in most of the services they offer to the people. According to the latest news report, Microsoft is now planning to add AI-powered text prediction functions in Word.
As per various reports, this feature has already been rolled out to 50 percent of Beta users of Windows in Microsoft 365. Further, the company intends to offer this brand-new feature to all its users. This sort of feature is already available in Gmail where it uses a predictive ability feature to tell users which words need to be typed according to the sentence.
How will the text-prediction feature work?
As far as the functioning of the feature is concerned, it uses machine learning to make writing suggestions. This is completely based on the text typed by the user. The upcoming update will also give a similar tool to smart compose suggestions over already written words and parts of sentences.
Once the feature gets launched, predictions on sentences will automatically start coming in the word document as soon as the user will start to type. If one wants to accept the suggestion then it could be added to sentences by pressing the ‘Tab’ key otherwise they can be ignored by pressing the ‘Escape’ key.
As this new function becomes available across all the Windows-enabled devices, there will be much more scope of it getting improved overtime on the basis of users’ demand and usage pattern. Besides this, the feature will also sport the option of turning it off for the users who don’t want to regularly utilise the feature.
Neowin, a tech website, first spotted this feature and have said that Microsoft may launch it by next month. Moreover, it is still not clear if the feature will be available for Mac devices or not. Other than this, Mac is expected to get an update of Office 2021 that will be launched for all the platforms.
Benefits of using text-prediction
Text prediction can be a very useful feature that speeds up the process of document creation as it helps users to write more effectively and efficiently. The quick text prediction will also allow for timely and accurate sentence formation. Microsoft has already rolled out this feature for Outlook users earlier.
When words are typed, the text prediction engine analyses the contextual relevance with the help of artificial intelligence-based neural networks which detect complicated intricacies across typed texts and sentences. For example, if someone types ‘Mars’ then the software will mostly predict the context of the sentence that will be related to Space and Astronomy.
Even before Microsoft, there have been many other softwares like Grammarly, Semrush, LightKey, Sapling, and TextCortex that too offer AI-based predictive text features.