Zoho releases AI-powered update for its Office Suite applications

Software maker Zoho Corporation has announced a new version of its Office Suite in which four cloud-based productivity applications have been enhanced with an artificial intelligence-powered assistant.

"We built Zoho Office Suite to be the most integrated suite of productivity tools of its kind," said Zoho chief executive Sridhar Vembu. "With this new version of Zoho Office Suite—empowered by (AI assistant) Zia—Zoho's integrations are tighter than ever before, providing seamless collaboration across departments and teams. We've added features and tools that can't be found anywhere else, such as Notebook's smart cards, Sheet's data-cleansing tool, and Show's integration with Apple TV.”

Zoho's document creation software, Zoho Writer, uses assistant Zia to detect context-based grammatical mistakes, rates the readability score of each document, and suggests style corrections to improve overall writing quality.

In Zoho Sheet, Zia provides deep insights into data sets by automatically drawing in relevant charts and pivot tables for the data. It also supports Natural Language Querying where users can ask Zia questions about their data and the assistant will respond with the appropriate function, chart, or pivot table, which can then be added to their spreadsheet.

In Zoho Notebook, Zia Voice, Zoho's conversational AI, can help users create a customised recipe "smart card" by grabbing relevant visuals, instructions, and shopping lists from websites—all initiated by voice command—and organising it in the application, the statement noted.

Zoho’s Office Suite provides end-to-end business solutions to both small and big enterprises. All the applications in the suite are integrated with each other in addition to Zoho’s communications tools (Zoho Mail and Cliq, a cross-platform messaging app), Zoho’s collaboration tools (Zoho Projects and Zoho Connect, a private social network for business), as well as Zoho’s other business applications.