Live data from Hacker News

Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

scribe.googlelabs.com

41–50 of 71 posts

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#41
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's really a clever trick, though my initial reaction was horror at the idea of checking one's grammar against the Internet. Looks like Scribe is only looking one or two words ahead, though - it's not actually checking what you've written, just throwing the Google Suggest box into your writing.

I use it all the time to check difficult words. It works well. Google usually even suggests "did you mean" the right spelling when you get it wrong.

This works especially well for words you can’t find in the dictionary or when you want to know whether the context in which you use a word is appropriate.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#42
Not sure if its the UI. But the auto-complete is actually more obtrusive than what I would expect from a text editor. If its gonna pop a suggestion box for every keystroke, it hinders my writing flow. It would be better if the editor could suggest better phrases (than the one I already wrote), or better words to make the text more formal.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#44

Interesting. It can also be used as a Markov chain text generator. Type one word, then just accept every suggestion. "In the case of these two types of information that is not appropriate for all users of the catalogue should also be noted that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them."

The cadence reminds me of a certain character from BSG. You tell me:

Kara Thrace and here is their website and buy this product again and again and I'ma let you finish but Beyonce had one of these days I'll bet your life on the road today and they are nothing but another form of therapy for these patients is not known whether these are the only ones who can not afford to pay for their own users and groups to their Friends / Favorites list yet.

That was... trippy.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#45

Interesting. It can also be used as a Markov chain text generator. Type one word, then just accept every suggestion. "In the case of these two types of information that is not appropriate for all users of the catalogue should also be noted that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them."

Barack Obama is a master at grabbing and keeping his audience's attention to the fact that the two are not the only one who can not afford to pay for the cost of the project is to develop a new generation of protein database search pro tab by The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus lyrics are property and copyright of the article is that I have no idea what to do.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#46

There are so many things to say about this. Thanks to Google for creating this tool which I must say still seems a bit random in its objectives though. I think the main issue here is that logic behind scribe is based on statistical frequency of co-occurrence of strings rather than any semantic logic. Granted, automating the semantics here could be tough and very expensive with the amounts of data available to Google'…

Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure if I agree, though; I think our natural understanding of language is acquired mainly though statistical inference, even though it may be encoded in the brain using a semantic taxonomy for efficiency. I doubt that a lot of people will use this, although the obvious place to deploy it is in mobile communications, where per-word prediction is still very slow and text entry is very ineff…

Agree partially. Statistical inference is at the heart of language acquisition but language processing is far more complex. Semantics always existed though. Long before we built computers, and long before we found out that computer programs and the hardware running them were somewhat limited in their ability to process language as fast and cleverly as our brains do. I look forward to the day this happens. In the meantime, I believe that the very nonsense that this nifty scribe puts out reminds us of how limited the automation of language still is.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#47

There are so many things to say about this. Thanks to Google for creating this tool which I must say still seems a bit random in its objectives though. I think the main issue here is that logic behind scribe is based on statistical frequency of co-occurrence of strings rather than any semantic logic. Granted, automating the semantics here could be tough and very expensive with the amounts of data available to Google'…

Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure if I agree, though; I think our natural understanding of language is acquired mainly though statistical inference, even though it may be encoded in the brain using a semantic taxonomy for efficiency. I doubt that a lot of people will use this, although the obvious place to deploy it is in mobile communications, where per-word prediction is still very slow and text entry is very ineff…

I must say I quite disagree too. I know a thing or two about Computational Linguistics and Statistical Inference is really a small potion of the corpus of work there. But the tool is funny and maybe useful nonetheless. Far from baked in my opinion though...

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#49
It's too slow to be useful -- suggestions don't keep up with typing at a reasonable speed. Plus, the fact that 10 suggestions need to be scanned before you can proceed slows the process even further. Maybe it's useful as a way to work around writer's block or to remember a word that's slipping off your mind.

Re: Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks. I'm not sure if I agree, though; I think our natural understanding of language is acquired mainly though statistical inference, even though it may be encoded in the brain using a semantic taxonomy for efficiency. I doubt that a lot of people will use this, although the obvious place to deploy it is in mobile communications, where per-word prediction is still very slow and text entry is very ineff…

From my very limited knowledge of language acquisition, my guess is you might be wrong (although I'm happy to be corrected). Don't human children acquire language much faster, more accurately and from poorer signals than would be possible via statistical inference?

I could be - I'm no expert on this either. My understanding of academic linguistics is that there are two main schools of thought: on one side you have Noam Chomsky as the most famous exponent, saying that all languages have a sort of universal grammar that somehow reflects our brain structure, and on the other the behaviorism of BF Skinner, that languages are largely arbitrary, syntactic processing is learned behavior, and complexity is both a result of and a selector for intelligence as an evolutionary trait.

I don't have a really strong opinion, though I lean a bit towards the behaviorist approach. There have been some suggestions from ethnomusicologists that small children everywhere sing the same sort of melody on the same scale, which inclined me to the opposite view for a while, but I think that was more of a theory than a finding and still needs evidence.

Post reply on HN