Voice Typing and other features Comes To Google Docs

jos · September 2, 2015

Research for Android

The helpful Research tool in Apps finally come to Android, so you can add links and images to your docs without having to hop around to a browser, copy and paste and you know the drill.

Talk to docs

Google has taken the powerful voice to speech technology it uses for search and Google Now and piped that into Docs. Now you can dictate your notes or the paper you’re working on.

More detailed change logs

Knowing who changed what in a doc is a pain in the ass to figure out. It’s important when collaborating with a team to know exactly what changed, what it said before and who did it. Knowing that context lets things get done faster. In school, at work or at home.

Simply hover over changes to get all of the context.

Explore in sheets

Google introduced “Explore in Sheets” today which pop up insights automatically based on the contents of the sheet that you open. You can highlight different sets of info and the charts will change dynamically. It’s pretty cool.

The idea is that Google can use its computational cloud power to find trends in huge docs full of numbers before you can. And while this doesn’t replace having your own data analyst, it can surely get you started or point things out to you right away.

Forms are no longer ugly

Google gave the whole product a swift kick in the butt with a cleanup that helps you make the form itself not look so ugly. Forms is clearly an important product to Google’s suite.

Templates

This user experience is quite helpful when starting a new doc from scratch. Google agreed and has tossed templates into play for Docs, Sheets and Slides.

They’re exactly what you’d expect, giving you templates for work, education, letters or making a resume. Super user friendly.