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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

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Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#61

Post by jmkni »

keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

There's nothing more frustrating than when you type the word you want to type, it changes it to a different word, you delete it and type the word you wanted to type again and then rinse/repeat 3 to 4 times before you have the word you actually wanted.

And if you're not paying attention, your message ends up looking like you're having a stroke.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#62

Post by neuroelectron »

I used a document editor in DOS with spellcheck. It was quite fast too. I don't remember what it was called but it featured formatting characters such as character returns and paragraphs. It had good printer support. I think it was called Easy Print and it was only a couple of dollars.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#63

Post by grishka »

numpad0 wrote: post #46

It's also a key enabler to CJK typing on computers. CJK scripts never map to keyboards well, so instead of actually typing, approximate representations are typed in and regularized into written forms using similar technologies as spell checkers. It's a neat thing if you speak one of the languages, sort of interesting that a similar tool haven't been integrated into English keyboards.

Doesn't Chinese input usually work by typing Latin codes for characters? Korean characters represent syllables made up of shapes representing individual sounds, those fit on a keyboard just fine. And I'm not sure about Japanese, there they may use something like spell checkers to map kana to kanji.

Another interesting challenge with CJK languages was just displaying them. You need higher-resolution graphics and a much bigger character ROM to even consider that.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#64

Post by AnotherGoodName »

mrweasel wrote: post #53
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but yes, there seems to be an increasing number of small issue with Apple devices. They aren't major stuff simply not work, but yes, spam filter being pretty terrible, text overlapping on non flagship phones (e.g. the iPhone SE). All sorts of minor annoyances.

Yep I've worked at other big tech where they had periodic "executive bug filing" where executives would flag minor things that are annoying. These minor issues would then have higher than normal priority purely by virtue of being flagged by an exec. I have a likely controversial opinion that this executive bug filing actually led to better outcomes.

It did break prioritization in the opinion of the ground level teams and their goals but I argue it's not bad to at least periodically do this since grating against the current org structure prioritization and goals is not a bad thing to do on occasion.

Chances are they'll find there's no team that considers themselves the owners of spell check or spam filtering and the goals the keyboard team are going for is likely some silly thing like "number of sentences with correct punctuation" leading to the current ridiculous outcomes where the period in the URL is way too prominent, especially considering we don't even type full URLS into the search bar that often these days.

Dear Apple leads: if you're reading this do a short initiative where execs aim to file an annoyance a day. It's not hard to find such. There will be some complaints at the ground level that these executive annoyances get too much priority but part of that will be because you're questioning lower level org priorities (a healthy thing to do!), not because the issues don't matter. The end result will bring Apple a bit more in line with the quality we saw during the Jobs period since this is exactly the kind of shake up he did on occasion.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#65

Post by NitpickLawyer »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #27
yndoendo wrote: post #18

It is 2025 and the best spell checker is a search engine. Numerous time an application will not provide the correct word. Only solution is to try the word in a search engine and try using in a sentence if that fails. In my opinion, this is where ML/AL local model, no internet required, would be the most beneficial today. Even had to use a search engine with, "thoughts and opi" because I forgot how to spell opinion be…

I've had a related idea for a while now. Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'. You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or p…

I've seen this in a UI. They went a step further and you could select a word (well token but anyway) and "regenerate" from that point by selecting another word from the token distribution. Pretty neat. Had the heatmaps that you mentioned, based on probabilities returned by the LLM.

This should also be pretty cheap (just one pass through the LLM).

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#67

Post by hilbert42 »

"A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering"

It still is. The spell checker on my Android phone is a PIA. It's too dumb to correct many typos, there's no way of highlighting wrongly used but correct words such a 'fro' and 'for', etc. There's no automatic or user defined substitution such as correcting 'rhe' with 'the' and yet keep the words highlighted until a final revision.

Wordpossessor spellers have no way of tagging certain words that one may or may not wish to use depending on context. A classic example that's caught me out past the draft and found its way into the final document without me noticing it is 'pubic' for 'public'. Why doesn't my speller highlight such words in red and ask whether I actually meant to use this word?

Moreover, spellers are not all of the same level of accuracy, for example Microsoft Word's speller is much better than LibrOffice's much to my annoyance as LibreOffice is my main (preferred) WP.

Nor is there a method of collecting misspelled words or typos and tagging them as spelling errors or typos for the purpose of helping one's spelling or typing. It'd be nice to have a list of my misspelled words together with their correct spelling, that way I could become a better speller. Also, spellers could be integrated with full dictionaries—highlight the word and press F1 for its meaning, etc.

There are no dictionary formats that are both universal and smart, that is that would allow for easy amalgamation between dictionaries and yet could contain user defined words and other user metadata which would be distinguished from the general corpus of words when crossed or amalgamated. For example, a smart dictionary format could contain metadata that would allow a dictionary and thesaurus to coexist in the same word list, similarly so different dictionaries, technical, medical etc.

All up, spellercheckers are still a damn mess. They need urgent attention.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#68

Post by NitpickLawyer »

jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

I had the same thing when the Encarta CDs started to include pronunciation tests. You'd get a word, speak it in the microphone, and get a "score" on how well you pronounced that word. Knowing what I know now, it was probably pretty inaccurate and hand wavy, but in the early 90s that was an absolutely amazing experience for an ESL person.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#69

Post by gitpusher »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45
keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#70

Post by jimt1234 »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

As I recall, there was some, but not a lot of FUD around spellcheckers, mostly because personal computers were still relatively new. Most GenX parents (Boomers) didn't even know what personal computers were yet, so they didn't know enough to be concerned. (I grew up in Missouri, which was the Digital Stone Age back then.) At the time, I think their complaining was more focused on MTV and video games.

However, also sounds weird, but I recall myself and some of my peers questioning spellcheckers, "Why do I need this?", because spelling was a primary mission of our education. We were all raised constantly being tested on spelling. In fact, I think I disabled the spellchecker on my old-ass 286 because it caused delays in the overall experience.

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