A few years after the feature launched in Gmail, Google has announced plans to expand its Smart Replies to Docs, enabling users to rapidly respond to comments by clicking a preset suggestion. The new capability will join other smart features relatively new to Google Docs, including spelling autocorrect and Smart Compose.
Google created its Workspace suite, sometimes collectively known as "Google Docs", to take on Microsoft Office by bringing productivity to the cloud. There was a time when the market seemed to be on a verge of an office suite war and while things have settled down, no clear winner has emerged yet. Google Docs and friends have definitely come a long way but a new feature that was announced is setting the Internet ablaze but not in a flattering way for Google Workspace.
Google kicked off Google IO 2021 today by announcing some improvements to Google Workspace, starting by revealing Smart Canvas and announcing some new features that are on the way to Google Meet. Google demonstrated Smart Canvas through the lens of a team split between in-person and remote employees who are working on a marketing campaign together, with Smart Canvas acting as something of a collaborative planning document as they kick off work and check things off their to-do list.
There was a point in time when the war between Google, Microsoft, and even Apple was just over productivity suites. While Microsoft Office probably still reigns in that market, Google Docs and its siblings have definitely eaten a large chunk of that pie, partly thanks to being browser-based as well as the surging popularity of Chromebooks. The platform's age, however, may be starting to show and Google is giving it an important upgrade that could, in turn, make third-party Chrome extensions for Google Docs stop working properly.
Depending on how you look at it, Facebook may have surpassed Google in being the poster child for harvesting personal data on the Internet. Considering how much of people's online lives and information it has in its possession, the social media giant regularly gets pushed, mostly through laws and regulations, to take certain steps to secure and unlock users' information. Part of that is allowing users to move their data outside of Facebook and a new export tool will let them do just that to transfer their posts to other online services.
![Gmail, Google Classroom, Docs are down or have issues [Update: They’re back]](https://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/googlewhatw-1280x720.jpg)
This morning a variety of Google services had a bit of a kerfuffle. Status for Google Drive, Google Dogs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Classroom were marked by Google as having a "Service Outage." Per the Google Workspace Status Dashboard, it was only these services that were having a full "outage." However, a significant number of Gmail users reported issues starting at around 8AM central time.
G Suite is going through some big changes today, with Google changing the service's name to Google Workspace. It appears that this change is being made to give a deeper sense of integration among Google's various productivity apps, and to put it in a better position to challenge Microsoft Office. With more people working from home amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the change is coming at a good time to.
Google Drive is down, Google Docs is down, and a couple of other services from Google are down at the moment, too. Google's own Service Outage reports suggest that many users aren't able to properly access Google Sheets or Google Slides, either. The current status of the Google Classroom system is also experiencing a Service Disruption here on January 27, 2020.
Google Docs is finally getting a feature that is already available in just about every other word processing application ever: real-time word counts. Yes, Google Docs already features a word count tool; it requires users to manually click through the menu every time they want to see it, however. The new addition brings the word counter to the main editor screen, enabling users to see it at a glance.
Dropbox is making it easier for its users to work in the cloud by integrating Google's office web apps with its cloud service. Under the new support, users who are signed into a Google G Suite account can directly access Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets within Dropbox, enabling them to save content, search files, manage access, and more.
Back in July, Google starting rolling out a grammar checker for Google Docs. This was no simple grammar checker Google had been cooking up, but rather one that was powered by machine learning. It's an impressive tool that tries to find the nuance in complicated grammar rules, but the problem is that the tool's initial launch was pretty limited in scope, as it was at first only available to users in G Suite's early adopter program.
G Suite and Google Drive offer a lot of handy tools to its enterprise customers, but there's one rather glaring issue with them: in order to collaborate on Docs, Sheets, and Slides with team members or clients, everyone needs to have a Google account. Google itself recognizes that it can be a "significant barrier for collaboration" when the person you're trying to work with doesn't have a Google account, so today the company is changing the rules.