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The Low-Hanging Fruit of Predictive Writing
We’ve all been using autocomplete and autocorrect when we text — it’s a handy feature that considerably speeds up the two-finger typing process. Indeed, a whole genre of humor has arisen around the gaffes that occur when we mistakenly choose, or accept by default, a word that completely changes the intent of our message, often in a mortifying way:
Lately other kinds of computer-assisted text prediction have come into common use. I wrote about one of these, Gmail’s use of “Smart Reply,” in a post a couple of months ago. Along with Smart Reply, Gmail also gives you the option of using “Smart Compose,” a somewhat amplified version of autocomplete in which not only words but complete phrases under construction at the keyboard are suggested for the user.
Google had a great deal of material to work with before this feature was implemented. Perhaps it learned from some of the celebrated fails that occurred when this kind of predictive writing was used without supervision in the Google search engine window, like this:
