Microsoft Editor uses artificial intelligence to help you write without prejudice

In an effort to offer the best solutions to its users, Microsoft is redefining all of its famous spelling correction suggestion tool from Word. now called MicrosoftEditor, the new version uses a IA advanced to offer much more than just pointing out words that may be misspelled, but even helping users make their texts better, more concise and, if they wish, more inclusive.

This new version is no longer linked only to the Word, and can be used to correct errors and suggest edits also for emails written in Outlook and, through an extension available for browsers Chrome e Edge, also help you to write better on any web page, being of great help to content producers for websites and blogs or anyone who needs to communicate with others through text messages.

New Microsoft Editor functions

With support for over 20 languages ​​(including Portuguese), the new MicrosoftEditor offers many more options for users, becoming more than a grammar correction tool. Of course, grammatical correction is still the main point of the Editor, but the use of AI allows it to offer many more options in this sense, not only indicating when a term is misspelled, but also, if the user enables this option, when a term may be offensive to someone.

By enabling the option inclusive language, the corrector will start to indicate when any term of the text can be considered offensive or perpetuates some kind of prejudice related to someone's age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and ability, in addition to also highlighting racist offenses or terms that can be considered as offensive in certain geopolitical contexts (for example, a word that can be considered part of the common vocabulary of Brazilians, but which would not become offensive if read by a Chinese person). In addition to highlighting them, the Editor it also offers suggestions on how the user might try to express the same idea using words that are neutral to any reader (or suggest removing something that is explicitly biased).

This possibility of suggesting another way of writing the same thing is not something exclusive to the inclusive language function, but a characteristic of the MicrosoftEditor. This is because the application uses its advanced AI to analyze all the text and suggest edits for sentences that may be difficult to understand or that are repeated in the general context, offering the user other ways to say the same thing. O Editor works with at least three different suggestions on how to “fix” a sentence, thus allowing users to have a more concise and easy-to-understand text, but without forcing a break in narrative style for those who literally work with words (like writers and journalists, for example).

Another great tool that MicrosoftEditor has is a similarity reviewer, a tool that analyzes the text and checks several parts of it through the internet to ensure that none of the contents of that text is plagiarism. And, if you identify something in it that was actually said by another author, it also helps the user to what he needs to do in his text so that this content is cited correctly, giving due credit to whoever originally produced it. These tools are available for all versions of MicrosoftEditor, including the browser extension Chrome e Edge, which can be downloaded for free and accessed by any subscriber Microsoft 365.

respect for individuality

One of the biggest concerns of Microsoft for your new Editor was to ensure that it was an inclusive tool, and that's something that came from its inception. This is because, according to the company, the idea of ​​creating a correction tool that not only corrects spelling errors, but is able to understand the context in which the sentences are inserted and suggest changes, came about after its employees noticed the difficulty of workers who suffered from dyslexia, and who spent hours reviewing all of their texts and emails to make sure there were no errors in them.

This is because the disease often makes these people say or write “correct” words but which do not make much sense in the sentence itself (for example, this person could have intended to write “see attached” in an email, but ended up typing “segue em convex”). And as standard correctors usually only look for spelling and grammatical problems, they would not consider the sentence as wrong, since the error lies in the semantics of the construction, and not in the grammar. ()

This case opened the company's eyes to a problem common to other people that could easily be solved with current technology. artificial intelligence. This allowed Microsoft to also change the whole conception of what a grammar correction tool is: instead of a single solution that should serve everyone in the same way (as the old tools were), the new MicrosoftEditor it should be a tool that understands the individual needs of each user and adapts to help them in the best possible way.

For this reason, the company developed the new Editor with the user at the center of it all. And, to ensure that the tool could make a difference in the lives of as many people as possible, the Microsoft talked with people of different socioeconomic profiles, geographic locations, intimacy with new technologies, physical limitations and even positioning on issues such as the use of IA and data privacy, getting a slew of different answers on questions like common problems and what degree of control they prefer to have over the programs they use – answers that were used as the basis for the entire development of the IA do MicrosoftEditor.

According to a Sumit Chauhan, corporate vice president of engineering focused on the Office suite, the objective of Microsoft is to offer tools to amplify human talent, whether you're writing a text, putting together a presentation or analyzing a spreadsheet. For Chauhan, this is not only the intention behind the creation of the MicrosoftEditor, but the narrative arc that explains how the company sees the availability of tools based on artificial intelligence for your users. 

Source: Microsoft, Microsoft Blog