At the end of September Google made a re-branding of its products and officially changed the name of Google Apps for Work to “G Suite”. This includes not only Docs, but Gmail, Drive, Calendar and the rest of Google Apps products. Along with these changes, the G Suite team has also been working on new productivity-focused features that began to come in yesterday from all users.

The new features of the application group are meant to help us save time, take advantage of integrations with third-party tools like Slack and also use machine learning to simplify and speed up our work.

Natural language processing

Thanks to this now Docs will be able to suggest actions to different elements intelligently. The new suggested task function will be activated if Documents detects the name or email address of someone with access to the file.

For example, if while you are writing the program, a task such as “Ana must finish the presentation”, Docs will show a suggested task in the right pane and from there you will be able to decide whether to assign or ignore the suggestion.

You can also manually assign actions to any user from all office applications, whether on the mobile or desktop. Just mention the person’s name in a comment (after a @ or + symbol) and a new drawer will appear to assign the task.

Once you begin assigning Docs tasks you will know how to direct your attention to them. The new tracking documents appear in Drive, Docs, Spreadsheets and Presentations as a number in the upper right corner of each file.

Prediction of questions

Google Forms has been learning to identify patterns since 2008, especially the types of questions that are asked in them and the answers that often accompany them. Thanks to this, the Forms can now predict the type of question you are asking and from this, suggest possible answers. All to save time.

In addition to this has been added a new function that allows you to request the upload of a file as a question type. Those who answer your forms will now be able to upload files directly from Drive or from your computer. This feature is only available to G Suite customers on the Forms they share within your business.

New voice commands

Although the voice dictation function exists since last year, now Google has added several new commands that allow us to add formatting to our documents without having to make a single click. From selecting text, to changing colors, to deleting words and inserting links and comments.

Integration with Slack

Slack has become one of the most used collaboration tools today, with this new integration we can now create and share Google Docs and Drive files directly within Slack.

Now the option to create a new Document, Spreadsheet or Google Docs presentation appears when we press the “+” button next to the message drawer. Files can be shared directly to the Slack channel where you work or stored in your Google Drive account.

All Drive documents you share in Slack will also be indexed automatically so you can easily search for and access fast old conversations and files.