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March 31, 2007

Google Writer


Google launched in October 2005 a feed reader, which became popular a year later. The company also offered publishing tools like Blogger, Page Creator and Google Docs, but even if they make your job easier by letting you focus on the content, you still have to come up with the text and the ideas.

Google Writer is a new application planned to be launched soon at Google Labs. It will integrate with many other Google services and guide you while writing a blog post, an essay or a news article.

Let's say you have a blog about Google, you wake up in the morning and wonder what to write. Now you can go to Google Writer, create a new project, enter some keywords and a small description and choose the default output (Blogger). Now when you create a new article inside this project, Google Writer gives you suggestions about the hot topics of the day, insightful articles about Google, news and popular queries that include "Google".

After choosing the topic, Google Writer suggests a title, some key quotes from other blogs and some interesting sites, images, and videos about the topic to facilitate your research. You can choose those that interests you and let Google Writer create some context around the quotes. Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences. It also learns your writing style from the previous articles, it knows your favorite authors, sites and your interests.

Now that you have the basis of the article, Google Writer suggests some concepts or portions of the text you should write about or expand. Google Writer has a smart autocomplete that learns from the web and is adapted to your style. It's also able to summarize text, to show interesting content from the web related to a text fragment and previous articles on the same topic.

At launch, the tool will only support Internet Explorer and Firefox, and will be invitation-only. Google intends to expand the tool for other online activities like sending mail, instant messaging, so you can dedicate more time to other important things, like writing cool applications. I asked Google if the creativity will disappear with tools like this that build a text on top of some aggregated fragments, but I only got a strange mail:

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
powered by Google Writer"

17 comments:

  1. Thank you Ionut! That will do with the April Fools if you don't mind...!

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  2. Google are pretty good at April Fools, so as a site covering Google, I would imagine it would be pretty hard to top them. Looks like you just did it though...

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  3. I agree, I think you have out-done Google's TiSP announcement, although I am sure that it won't be long before somebody does bring out a product like this.

    If you have been keeping an eye on the "internet marketing guru" style releases this year there has been a lot of software released this year promising to auto-write articles for adsense sites, I am sure this would go down perfectly in those circles.

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  4. Very funny, Ionut!

    By the way, taking the part where you said "Google Writer has a big database of n-grams from web pages and it's able to create grammatically-correct sentences" seriously for a second, have you seen some of the work on this like

    http://piece.stanford.edu/~brendano/rsg/

    It is interesting how good those random 5-gram sentences can be.

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  5. Darn. I was hoping for this one to be at least kinda true...

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  6. The Sloof Lirpa Center has released a (funny) warning about Google AdSense code vulnerability. Seems to fit in with Google's April 1 gags.

    http://www.slooflirpacenter.com

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  7. Does google know about it ? lol happy fools day

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  8. hahaha "where to register?"

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  9. Umm... this does exist. It's just not made by Google.

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  10. Oh shit. It thought this was serios until now! You really got me there.

    I would really like a application like this.

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  11. To eric who said: "Umm... this does exist. It's just not made by Google."

    That's Windows Live Writer, a software that lets you publish to a blog. The app is nice, but it doesn't have any feature described in my post.

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  12. Ionut, this is not joke. It can be reality.

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  13. So if It can be reality, why you dont provide the link?

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  14. Lol i was searching for some code that can replace my "post a comment" text tp some things like your "What do you think?" ,I first saw it on This blog But it seems no wounder ,could you tell us how.

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  15. Is this some kind of RSS feed where you get those post from a site related to you topic?

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  16. Google Writer seems too good to be true. With this tools, even a small child would be able to write good article with the help of google writer. Any example of a article written with the help of google writer?

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