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Showing posts from February, 2014

Google can spell like a fucking champ

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Remember in the eighties when voice recognition was targeted as one of the "technologies of the future". Maybe years now every device has crude speech recognition but only Google and Apple have gotten to the level where this is usable. (Does anyone remember trying to command your Motorola Razr by voice?) History of error rates of speech transcription . This is made possible by the huge speech corpus that Google has. But here is another advancement I don't see anyone noticing: spelling/grammar detection. Google Docs has this built in and you can see context sensitive corrections like the following: Not impressed? How about this, it knows the correct abbreviation of European when used in the context of a works cited page: No? How about this, it knows which Glycoprotein inhibitors you should use for treating unstable angina: It knows the correct authors of publications in obscure medical journals: It is very difficult for a small startup or research