
Google Scribe - Get autocomplete suggestions as you type - abraham
http://scribe.googlelabs.com/
======
DanielStraight
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."

~~~
kylec
You can even get it to repeat itself after a while:

    
    
        I have been able to find anything in these search results from RT on your
        Google searches by subscribing to the feed via email to state their case
        and their ownership of their owners and are strictly for viewing and printing
        of these books 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, so I'ma
        keep popping up in their own right and do not want to be related to their
        particular field or industry in which they are attached to their respective
        owners and are strictly for viewing and printing of these books 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, so I'ma keep popping up in their own
        right and do not want to be related to their particular field or industry in
        which they are attached to their respective owners...

~~~
sigil
Congratulations, you just found a fixed point attractor.

~~~
troymc
I think a fixed point attractor would be a word or phrase where it goes
naturally but then doesn't have any more suggestions: a dead end.

This is more of a periodic-solution attractor.

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danh
I'd actually like to see the exact opposite: an editor that warns me every
time I use a too common and worn out phrase or sequence of words.

That shouldn't be too hard to do, should it? :)

~~~
jshen
1 I'd actually like to see

2 the exact opposite

3 worn out phrase

4 that shouldn't be too hard

5 should it?

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chime
I shared a similar app here on HN a while ago that used Google's own suggest
feature to guess the next word or two: <http://chir.ag/projects/ktype/>

KType was a demo for something like Scribe that I wanted to make for disabled
users.

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leif
<http://imgur.com/8YJIB.png>

Looks like it includes someone's source code, probably that of the page
itself?

~~~
abyssknight
I thought perhaps someone was trying to see Scribe with XSS exploits.

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cankoklu
I tried it with the entire alphabet.. you can see it here:
[http://blog.cankoklu.com/google-scribe-abcs-nothing-but-
anot...](http://blog.cankoklu.com/google-scribe-abcs-nothing-but-another-
form-o)

The attractor does seem to be "nothing but another form of therapy"..

Almost all letters end in this loop..

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danielnicollet
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's. However, there are
some ways to do that if the index can be structured more efficiently and by
using low-level semantic logic like taxonomies - I wrote a white paper about
this if anyone is interested: [http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-
Papers/ajax-incremen...](http://www.exorbyte.com/index.php/White-Papers/ajax-
incremental-search-interfaces.html)

~~~
anigbrowl
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 inefficient. This seems 'good enough' for most
functional communications. But I would imagine that it is or will be running
in the background soon on all Google pages featuring text entry, like docs or
mail, because that will provide a huge flow of data to refine their models
against.

~~~
bigfudge
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?

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

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redraga
Neat! So is this just a fun project or does Google plan to use this technology
in any of their products?

Edit: You can use Scribe on any web page. From the help section: "Google
Scribe can be used anywhere, on any web page, using the Google Scribe
Bookmarklet.

From the Google Scribe home page, drag the Google Scribe Bookmarklet (located
below the text box) to Bookmarks toolbar (or Favorites toolbar depending on
your browser). To use Google Scribe on a web page, click on the Google Scribe
Bookmarklet. Google Scribe will then enable itself on the active text field on
the webpage. Enabled text fields display the icon at top end corner of the
active field."

~~~
CWuestefeld
_So is this just a fun project or does Google plan to use this technology in
any of their products?_

It might make sense to use this as one predictor for transcribed text in
Google Voice. Then again, once the results begin to diverge, this would
amplify the problem.

------
VMG
Seems as if they blacklisted inappropriate suggestions - the most outrageous
thing suggested so far was "why do atheists gravitate towards stuffed animals"

~~~
VMG
"Homosexuality is a" yields interesting results

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bgraves
Be sure to check out the bookmarklet. It works on any text field (I'm using it
now).

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emehrkay
Start with a word, hit tab 10 times, paste your result.

> Moneywatch MovieTome mySimon NCAA Showtime SmartPlanet TechRepublic The
> Insider on TV and radio.

~~~
zyb09
Hacker News is an online business directory that has the most complete and up
to date with the latest active trackers for this torrent download

------
wicknicks
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.

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dododo
it predicts what you're going to type next. this is really nothing new.
perhaps the most interesting use of predicting input in this fashion is
dasher:

<http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/>

it uses this prediction to make it efficient for people who cannot type, type.

~~~
jshen
predicting text and predicting text well are two very different things.

~~~
dododo
what's the relevance of that comment?

is your claim that dasher does not predict well?

or rather, that google scribe predicts better than dasher?

it would surprise me: dasher adapts to the linguistic habbits of the
particular user. it learns in real time.

google scribe doesn't appear to do this. it doesn't know who i am.

~~~
jshen
my point is that saying "nothing new here" often dismisses what really
matters, the quality of something.

I've never used dasher so I can't comment on it

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georgecmu
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.

------
eitally
If only it auto-inserted a space after words it would be so much more
efficient.

------
olalonde
Neat technology. If it was just slightly more responsive, I am sure it could
be interesting for some use cases such as helping out non-native English
speakers write with proper grammar and diversified vocabulary.

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rarestblog
Hmm, doing this seems to be slower than actually writing a text.

~~~
willscott
I would imagine the appeal is less towards native/fluent speakers at this
point, and more for people who are learning or uncomfortable with english
grammar.

I have several friends who use Google to as a first editor of their grammar by
making sure that phrases they aren't sure are correct return lots of search
results. This seems like a convenient way for them to streamline that process.

~~~
danielsoneg
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.

~~~
jules
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.

~~~
ugh
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.

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quizbiz
I would be interested to see if they can improve the results speed to the
point where choosing the results would be faster than typing.

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Robin_Message
If you type a semi-colon, you get ";:::;" - Where did they mine that from, it
looks emacsy!

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antileet
Funnily enough, the auto-completion censors profanity.

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binarymax
once upon a time in the world of technology we were not significantly
different from those that have already passed their driving test

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superjared
<http://cl.ly/5aca0e33680045e2a99b>

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ams6110
Reminds me of Clippy.

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PEM524
Today

------
PEM524
From

------
PEM524
today and from

------
confuzatron
_Osama bin Laden dead or alive xtreme beach volleyball._

