During Build 2019 last year, Microsoft first announced the Rewrite feature in Microsoft Word. Rewrite feature allowed users to quickly find alternative expressions for phrases in their writing. Recently, Microsoft updated this Rewrite feature to make it even more useful. In addition to phrasal suggestions, Rewrite feature now offers sentence-level writing suggestions. This feature was made possible by Microsoft's cutting-edge, neural-network, machine learning models, which are trained on millions of sentences.

Sometimes it's hard to choose between a laptop and a tablet. You might want to draw with a stylus, and tap the screen in a game, perhaps. Or you may need a keyboard so you can type a long document. Two-in-one machines gives you the best of both worlds, with a keyboard that folds back through 180 degrees to sit on the back of the screen, creating a thick tablet. In some cases, the display part detaches to be used in tablet mode.

Microsoft's 2017 may as well be known as the year the company turned away from the consumer and, sadly, back toward the enterprise. This past year was notable for two casualties: Microsoft's phone business finally died, as did Groove Music, the music subscription service that Microsoft abandoned in favor of Spotify. In fact, you could argue that Microsoft's software and services didn't succeed nearly as well as its hardware, where a new generation of Surfaces and Xbox One consoles were generally well received. It didn't help that management seemed to feel that staid enterprise Azure and Office 365 represented Microsoft's future, either. Now, question marks hang over Microsoft's plans for 2018. The spark is there, but will consumers care?

We'll recap this week's news highlights, plus big stories from Friday like Project Loon-distributed internet going live in Puerto Rico. Former Google X Lab (and now Alphabet X innovation lab) resident Project Loon is getting its first use in the US, as it's partnering with AT&T to provide service in Puerto Rico. As part of the restoration efforts, the high-flying balloons are launching from Nevada and floating over the island, all in hopes of beaming LTE to areas still without service a month after Hurricane Maria. The first Cortana speaker sounds amazing.Harman Kardon Invoke review The good news about this $199 smart speaker is that it sounds great, and Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant is a natural addition. The bad news is that as a latecomer to the game, it has fewer music service integrations, and right now, Cortana isn't as capable as competitors like Amazon's Alexa. You say replicant, we say repli-can.Bad Password: Apps and gadgets for the'Blade Runner' future we didn't ask for This week, Violet Blue explains how technology can help make the best of our dystopian present -- at least until Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling show up to fix things.

With the Surface Book, Microsoft delivered yet another way to rethink traditional computers. It resembled a laptop more than the earlier Surface devices, which were basically tablets with keyboard covers. But it also packed in one new trick: a large screen that you could easily remove at the touch of a button and use as a tablet. At the heart of that feature was a unique hinge that looked unlike anything else on the market. It had one big problem, though: It wasn't very stable.

Welcome to the mid-week Morning After. So long, wobbly fulcrum hinge. Surface Book 2 hands-on: The sequel we've been waiting for The Surface Book 2 sounds like it may fix all of the issues we had with the original model (as well as last year's refresh). It has a stronger hinge, so no more screen-wobble as you're typing, and it's (predictably) more powerful than before. Microsoft also added a 15-inch model, making the Surface Book 2 even more of a competitor to Apple's MacBook Pro line.

Microsoft is launching a new version of its Surface Book, the detachable laptop-tablet hybrid it first introduced in 2015. The new model includes five times the graphics performance of its predecessor, according to Microsoft, which also claims it has twice the power of a MacBook Pro. The Surface Book 2 will be available in 13 and 15-inch configurations, with the smaller model starting at $1,499 and the larger at $2,499. The laptop runs on Intel's eighth generation processors and the company says it offers 17 hours of battery life, an improvement from the older model. Microsoft is pushing the Book 2 for gamers as well -- a crowd that Apple has never been able to capture with its own laptops.