With the launch of the Pixel 6 and the Pixel 6 Pro almost 4 months ago, Google made some features exclusive to them that were not present in older pixel devices or any other Android phone for that matter. One of these features is a “Grammar check” capability in Gboard that spots and corrects grammar errors as you type.
What makes the Grammar check stand out is that it does this offline to preserve your privacy, therefore no data is sent from your phone to an online server before it checks whether what you are typing has grammatical errors.
This feature, moving forward, is now being made available for other Pixel phones to take advantage of.
“Gboard on Pixel 6 (and now other Pixel devices as well) works entirely on-device to preserve privacy, detecting and suggesting corrections for grammatical errors while the user is typing. Building such functionality required addressing a few key obstacles: memory size limitations, latency requirements, and handling partial sentences. Currently, the feature is capable of correcting English sentences (we plan to expand to more languages in the near future) and is available on almost any app with Gboard,” a Google spokesman is quoted saying regarding the implementation of the Grammar check.
When typing on an eligible device, the grammatical errors that you make will be underlined by a blue line, drawing your attention to it. When you tap on the underlined words, you will then be provided with recommended words similar to how the autocorrect feature works, but now it is a complete phrase rather than a single word.
The feature is enabled by default, but should you feel it gets in the way and does not add value to your daily needs, it can be easily turned off by navigating to the Gboard settings, selecting “Text correction” then unticking “Grammar check”
To hammer home the Grammar check efficiency and low requirements on mobile devices, Google notes that the model only takes 20 MB of storage and performs inference on 60 input characters under 22 ms on the Google Pixel 6 CPU.
“Mobile devices are constrained by limited memory and computational power, which make it more difficult to build a high-quality grammar checking system. There are a few techniques we use to build a small, efficient, and capable model,” reads part of Google’s blog post making the announcement.
The Pixel 6 is the company’s first true flagship phone with a custom chipset, meaning the performance will be slightly less impressive on older devices, but it is still a massive achievement considering other similar solutions in the market involve sending the data you are typing to an online server rather than processing it offline.
It is not yet clear whether the tech giant will roll out the feature to other phones other than Pixel devices. At the time of writing this article, other Android devices including Samsung models running Android 12 have not yet received an update introducing the feature.
We will provide an update once they do, as it will be nice having a Grammarly equivalent for mobile phones at the tips of our hands, although with stripped-down functionalities.
