Google is working on bringing an on-device grammar check feature to Chrome OS. If you are someone, like me, who depends on spell check, this will make you happy.

On-Device, That’s Nice

Google is getting better at this on-device thing. They recently managed to make voice recognition work on your device, without sending it to Google servers for processing.

A code commit that I spotted today talks about bringing an on-device grammary check for Chromebooks:

“Add flag for on-device grammar check and add it to chrome://flags page. Design doc for this feature is at go/cros-grammar, approved by small council review.”

The design document of course is an internal Google document that we may not get to see. This leaves us without much information on how this feature would work.

For now, here is the flag name and description:

“On-device Grammar Check: Enable new on-device grammar check component”

The offline model will make things much faster. However, the privacy benefit is my favorite. On-device model means we don’t have to send everything we type to a Google server to check grammar.

That’s nice to have.

Summary

We should be able to test this feature in one of the upcoming Canary channel releases. We shall update this page when more information becomes available.

On-device grammar check seems to be part of a handful of other similar features that Google is adding to Chrome OS. Here are a couple of possibly related flags:

Multilingual typing on CrOS: Enables support for multilingual assistive typing on Chrome OS.

Enables support for multilingual assistive typing on Chrome OS: Enable assistive multi word suggestions for native IME

We might soon see an official announement from Google around these features. What do you think?

Does this sound like an attractive feature to you? Let me know in the comments section.

Source: Chromium Gerrit.