Microsoft Corp. today announced plans to rebrand Office 365 to Microsoft 365 on April 21, a name change that will be accompanied by the addition of a raft of new artificial intelligence features across the suite’s core applications. 

Microsoft is also adding a new Family Safety app as part of a drive to make the software bundle more appealing to consumers. 

First up are the enhancements for Word. Editor, the built-in AI assistant tool in the document editor that provides grammar, spelling and style suggestions, can now help users rephrase sentences to improve readability. Microsoft has also equipped Editor with a new text similarly checker that points out if certain parts of a document mirrors prior work.

The company’s long term plans for the AI assistant go beyond the Word interface. Alongside the the new text analysis features, Microsoft 365 Global Apps Lead Megan Dohnal today announced that Editor will become available in the web-based version of Outlook, the free Outlook.com service and as a browser extension for Chrome and Edge. 

“Whether you are posting casually on Facebook or LinkedIn or writing in depth for a site like Medium, you can create with confidence knowing Editor will flag misspelled words and grammatical,” Donhal wrote in a blog post.

Similarly to Word, PowerPoint has a built-in AI assistant in the form of Presenter Coach, a feature Microsoft released late last year. The company is rolling out a new version of the assistant that can listen to a presenter’s tone of voice and make recommendations to help them avoid a monotone delivery. It adds grammar suggestions where appropriate.

Microsoft is adding more automation to the slide design phase of PowerPoint projects as well. “With a simple click, you can transform text into a beautiful timeline. Or when you add a picture to your slide,” Yusuf Mehdi, the corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Modern Life, Search & Devices group, detailed in a blog post of his own. 

The changes coming to Excel as part of the shift to Microsoft 365 are primarily designed to make the spreadsheet editor more appealing for consumers. Microsoft has added a personal finance spreadsheet, dubbed Money, that integrates with the user’s bank account and visualizes their purchases. Money is joined by more than 100 new data types that will make it easier for consumers to organize information such as movie titles, places and food items. 

The enhancements are part of an effort by Microsoft to update Office 365’s image from a product suite primarily focused on work to one that users can also employ in their personal lives. “We want to help you and your family across work, school, and life,” Microsoft’s Mehdi wrote in his blog post.

The rebrand to Microsoft 365 is another element of that refocus. So is a set of new sharing features for Microsoft Teams, also announced today, that will allow users to create groups for family and friends.

The consumer-friendly enhancements to existing Office 365 apps will roll out together with an entirely new service, Microsoft Family Safety, that will allow parents to manage their kids’ internet usage across devices and keep an eye on certain offline activities as well. 

“Microsoft Family Safety helps you stay connected with location sharing and notifications when a family member arrives or departs a location like home, school, or work, to help give you the peace of mind that your family is where they need to be,” Mehdi detailed. “And, for inexperienced drivers in the household, you can use driving reports to help build better habits behind the wheel.”

“I am surprised at just how good Microsoft’s new services look,” analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE. “I say that because of how hard it is for a company that is successful in the enterprise to be consumer successful. I have seen many of these features in action and am most excited about platform-independent Family Safety, Teams for household management, and some of the ML-inspired features in Word and PowerPoint like Editor and tools that help deliver better presentations.”

Photo: Microsoft