Google adds voice typing and other features to Google Docs

Google has made Google Docs more user-friendly to help facilitate enhanced work and school productivity with the new Google ''voice typing feature''.

As can be made out from the name of the feature itself, it allowed users to type in the words by speaking the words.

Google's engineering director, Jude Flannery, in his article posted on Google Works' blog on 2 September, shared the newest features that could help people collaborate easier using Google Docs.

These features were meant to help make analysing data more ''intuitive'' and editing (including styling) more dynamic.

Voice Typing which was one of the features Flannery shared on his blog post, is a tool that allows users to keep records of conversations or ideas by simply allowing Docs to enter the words the user spoke.

It was an innovation that had been implemented by Google Docs after improvements were made to the tech company's voice transcription software.

The voice typing feature allowed teammates to collaborate in a more effective way as it took note of longer dictated sentences. Regardless of which part of the world each team member was in, the tool kept track of the conversation, recorded it, and made meeting easy.

In addition to voice typing, other key additions included a Research tool, Explore tool, new forms and a history tracker that kept track of all the changes made to a document by various users.

Also users could input their thoughts and even compose entire documents without pressing a single key on the keyboard. Chrome users, on Google Docs, could enable Voice typing from the Tools menu, with a simple tap on the microphone button activating the feature which supported over 40 languages.

According to commentators, the feature could save a lot of time, and those who were not habitual of using a keyboard would benefit the  most from the new Google offering.

Explore in Sheets was an effective substitute for pivot tables in MS Excel and the function automatically created graphical presentations of data, that gave users a real insight into the way that they could manage their crucial data.

Also according to commentators, users who had to learn the functions of pivot tables might find this update quite useful. It did not do everything for users but helped create basic graphical representations.