Microsoft Word is Getting Text Predictions Next Month (theverge.com) 117
Microsoft is planning to add text predictions to Word in March. From a report: The new feature will work similarly to Google Docs' Smart Compose option, using machine learning to predict what words an author will need to speed up document creation. Microsoft originally announced a beta of text predictions last year, but it's now on the Microsoft 365 roadmap to reach all Word users on Windows next month. Word will highlight grayed-out predictions when users are writing a document, and the suggestions can be accepted using the Tab key or rejected by hitting Escape. Text predictions can also be completely disabled by Word users.
Mobile ideas. (Score:4, Funny)
Now just think of how better spelled Slashdot would be if this was in every browser. Plus "first posts" would come easier.
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Mod that up, +1, Funny.
Libre Office does everything I need (Score:2, Interesting)
Others may need MS stuff. Fair enough.
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Ever hear of PDFs?
WIll Now Take Longer (Score:5, Insightful)
to create a document because of having to fix the auto-correct constantly.
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to create a document because of having to fix the auto-correct constantly.
I noticed that a lot for a while in android trying to replace a perfectly valid word with a "better" one that had a completely different meaning. I don't think I've seen that as much recently.
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Fixing a genuine spelling mistake with a DIFFERENT correct word is an example of the cure being worse than the disease.
Words have built-in error bit detection. A human can see a word with an incorrect letter and immediately know what the correct word is. (Grammar Yahtzee's have turned this into a lifestyle, which only proves my point.) On the other hand you can read through a document with a correctly spelled word that changes the meaning and either accept it or assume they meant a different word - which
Re: WIll Now Take Longer (Score:1)
I work in a poultry farm, and I don't give a duck. My boss would be upset because we actually sell them and giving stock away for free is bad business.
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Do they? I think you're going to struggle to support that claim against the null hypothesis that (whichever language you're talking about) developed randomly, adding in random choices by users along side features from all the other languages known by all the other users, also randomly.
OK, I'll make an exception for Esperanto - that was, to a degree, designed. Using large concept blocks from Latin and Romance languages, but little from common languages like the 57 var
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Shh, don't let facts or logic get in the way of a good M$ bashing. Learn to read the room, would you?
Re:WIll Now Take Longer (Score:4, Insightful)
To me, it has nothing to do with MS bashing.
Predictive text was mandatory on a T9 keyboard, a reasonable feature on a phone keyboard, and absolutely useless on a tablet or standard keyboard.
Come on, MS... who asked for this?
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Predictive text on a phone or tablet speeds up typing for those *paying attention* while using it. It's not magical, but in some it's pretty darn accurate.
Auto filling would work really well for Journalist (Score:1)
They just need to type in the headline and maybe a couple of sentences. That is all that most articles contain. The AI would then bloat that out to the required number of words, by repetition and adding random background facts from Wikipedia.
Could not be too difficult. Gee, even journalists can do it.
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what, useless? think of millions of students writing essays.
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Soon you can type "A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching" and watch the rest of your story unfold without the silly fits and starts!
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Can you go into EVERY Outlooks default settings and change ">" from converting to an automatic bullet in replies.
Re:WIll Now Take Longer (Score:4, Informative)
"You have to hit TAB to allow accept the suggestion,"
Except that TAB is used for other things too, like going to the next tab stop when writing column aligned things, or going to the next table cell in tables. There's probably other things it does, in other contexts like headers and footers, bibliographies and indexes, etc...
Re: WIll Now Take Longer (Score:4, Insightful)
It bothers me to have to turn off shit I haven't asked for.
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to create a document because of having to fix the auto-correct constantly.
So you haven't used it, don't know how it works, but insist on drawing a conclusion anyway publicly displaying your ignorance. Why is that? Do you actively seek ridicule? Or do you actually and manually take a suggestion from every suggested word and then go back and delete it? If so, seek psychiatric help.
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I was speaking of my own experiences with auto-correct in various programs. You bitterness seems to indicate maybe, just maybe you are the one that needs psychiatric help.
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I was speaking of my own experiences with auto-correct in various programs. You bitterness seems to indicate maybe, just maybe you are the one that needs psychiatric help.
I'm not bitter, just calling out stupid people when I see them. You made an silly assumption about another product from another vendor and yet declared with certainty your ignorant position.
Your experience is only worth two things: jack, and shit.
Now in the real world how this system already works (since it is already used in some MS programs) is completely hands off having precisely zero impact on you preparing documents as you need to manually accept each suggestion.
Now please tell us about all the other
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I bet you are real fun at parties. Now kindly go fuck yourself.
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It doesn't auto-correct. It suggests words and phrases. You hit the tab key to accept it. If you don't want it, it does nothing while you continue typing.
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Well I don't have a copy of the new Word, so I don't know what it does.
Since the article says it is coming next month, I don't see how ANYONE knows what it exactly does or doesn't do.
I quit taking the word of companies decades ago.
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It's already present at outlook.com. It looks like they've been testing it there for the past several months, perhaps as long as a year.
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It probably will. Finding it may be the challenge. Then remembering the location so when Microsoft patches it and turns it back on you can find it again.
Do not want (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like this feature in code, email or documents. I spend a lot of time mashing escape to make it go the fuck away, assuming I can't figure out where they hid the setting to disable it.
Worst feature ever, except maybe "ribbons".
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I had a friend, a Phd in physics. He told me about one particular dissertation paper (back before this tech, but related).
The proof reader corrected every occurrence of "iff" to "if".
Same here.
I had a similar experience: a professor corrected my "iff" to "if" and I had to explain it to her. It was a graduate class and, given the subject matter, she shouldn't have needed a student to explain it to her. It wasn't as if I was trying to be extra clever by throwing it in unnecessarily—I was quoting a source!
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This may be very problematic for those of us who write technical documentation. Will it know the correct terminology, acronyms, and expressions?
I was actually thinking that technical writing is the only field where this could actually work well. Because technical writing depends on a certain argot and works almost programmatically, it would be easier to create a predictive algorithm for technical writing than other forms. The formatting and whatnot is already XML. Given that technical writers usually have to adhere to very specific style guidelines, it would be much easier to predict everything from terminology to syntax. You could even optimize it
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Huh? Presumably, it will just display it in grey but won't type the sentence into the document unless you press the side arrow. In other words, it won't mess with your typing like autocorrect does.
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I love this feature. Makes emails faster, a lot of them are just routine stuff.
For code is even better. You can easily use long, descriptive variable names because code competition makes typing them really fast.
Definitely helpful in some contexts. Not in meetin (Score:2)
I've certainly found it helpful in some contexts.
There are certain sentences I use frequently.
In code, if I write "while " pretty much every time that's going to end up being:
while ( ) {
}
So yeah. Long ago I created my own autocomplete for such things in vim. It leaves my cursor in the parens, where I want it.
On the other hand, predictive text / autocomplete can be bad when you're presenting in a meeting. Maybe I should use things like incognito windows when presentingto reduce that tendency.
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FTFY
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When some recruiter contacts me I don't need to reply with a Shakespearian sonnet. When I'm acknowledging a meeting I don't require anything more than a simple canned sentence.
Even when writing more complex emails, Gmail often predicts the rest of the sentence I was going to write anyway. If I was going to write that then who cares if it was autocompleted or not, the result is exactly the same.
I've got better things to do than hand craft exquisite emails.
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Excellent! You can't make this stuff up!
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Escape? Why not just keep typing? The feature does literally nothing unless you select the word and can be completely ignored.
Personally I find it pointless because registering the suggestion visually and then deciding to accept it is slower than simply touch typing in the first place.
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You can ignore it to the same degree you can ignore blinking ads and seizure-inducing animated GIFs. Having "suggestions" pop up constantly will be very, very distracting for any professional writer.
Will there be a new market for suggestion blockers in productivity applications?
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Will there be a new market for suggestion blockers in productivity applications?
Just.
Turn.
It.
Off.
Seriously, how hard is this?
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You can ignore it to the same degree you can ignore blinking ads and seizure-inducing animated GIFs.
I mean if you can't handle this then how did you make it this far on the internet.
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don't get me started on the Ribbon!
At the point it was introduced my big beef was that I (and probably most people) had spent long enough learning how to use Office pretty much the same way, every version that it seemed not only unnecessary, but almost intentionally trying to push a particular way of working on users. And I know for a fact I wasn't the only person who thought this way, because for a while you could buy an office extension to disable the ribbon and bring back menus, which of course you had
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You don't hit escape. You just keep typing. The tab key accepts the suggestion. Any other key makes it go away automatically.
and will be bannded from the bar test. (Score:2)
and will be bannded from the bar test.
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You shouldn't be editing important documents while drinking.
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Isn't that one of the biggest things the bar is supposed to test? Whether you can write legal documents while chugging scotch?
Clippy (Score:2)
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Clippy. Wont. Die.
only change names
The New Clippy? (Score:1)
The New Clippy? that will pop up and "help" you to speed up document creation. I've found auto-co-wreck (auto-correct, corrected) slows me down. One reason I use FocusWriter to write the text, and then paste it (if I must...) into Word. But the need for speed when trying to pour one's thoughts on virtual paper...
I personally am waiting for the brain-interface to Word, but then it will be a headache in more ways than one.
Which relies upon... (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder what the liability is on Microsoft's end if they get compromised...
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APIs which submit your typing to Microsoft servers, just like how Office uploads the images you insert to perform AI analysis to add descriptions of said images (for accessibility as well as searchability) to documents automatically...I wonder what the liability is on Microsoft's end if they get compromised...
I suspect that when Microsoft get compromised, the anti-Microsoft folks will be surprised to learn that in most cases Microsoft didn't actually retain problematic data, and it was all so aggregated or anonymized that there's no liability. Just my guess.
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You can't compromise Microsoft -- they already compromised everything to start with. ;-)
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I wonder what the liability is on Microsoft's end if they get compromised...
Fortune 500 companies literally store secret internal documentation on Microsoft provided hardware in Microsoft's cloud accessed via Microsoft's website. These APIs are the least of their concerns.
Incidentally the company I work for recently declared we're no longer allowed to use online translation services, except for Microsoft office's built in translator, which sends data to MS.
GPT-3 FTW! (Score:1)
As a computer nerd I would love to hear they've licensed Google's generative model. Of course that is really awful and inevitable, and is going to bring us all the trouble we would expect. Remember "let's make a chatbot trained on stuff people say online"? That was great too.
Oh goody (Score:2)
I was just thinking that my word processor needed another way to pop up just the word I didn't want.
Where is the data from? (Score:2)
So, like OpenOffice.org c.2004? (Score:2)
Yeah, OpenOffice.org had this feature in 2004. It was actually pretty useful.
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You should consider switching to Libre Office.
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Yes and the same "feature" is just as annoying in LO as it was in OO. Definitely one of the first things to turn off. Very annoying.
"Dear Aunt (Score:2)
letâ(TM)s set so double the killer delete select all."
I can't wait to untangle the mess this will create...
That's fine with me (Score:2)
But only as long as it's done via audio prompts, and in Gilbert Gottfried's voice [youtube.com].
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A fun game that I played once ... (Score:2)
was to send some SMSs to a friend. Start each with a letter or two and accept whatever text prediction gave me. Just make sure that the friend is a good one and knows what you are doing!
Re: ...A fun game that I played once (Score:2)
A fun game that I played once I get the money supply to the house and get the money supply to keep up with the other one I can get you a copy of the receipt.
That's what happened when I accepted the autocomplete on yours. Makes more sense than some things we see posted on Slashdot.
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It just got stuck on stupid. Silliness is fun.
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A priest, a rabbit and a vicar walk into a bar.
The barman says to the rabbit, "What do you want to drink?"
The rabbit replies,"I don't know, I'm only here because of predictive text."
Copyright infringement? (Score:2)
I wonder if you use it too much if they can charge for copyright infringement, since they (or their algorithms) are doing the writing?
paper clip (Score:2)
Will it have a cartoon paper clip along with the suggestion to make it 'fun' too? They could call it Clippy.
L:ike most other automagic (Score:3, Insightful)
Like most other automagic this will probably work better when disabled. This is bound to be yet another annoyance which has to be disabled as part of the installation and setup procedure for all Microsoft products. It only takes minutes to install Microsoft product, but then you need to take *days* to disable all the mis-features to make them useable.
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My kingdom for a mod point. This is the first thing I do any time I get a new machine at work, disable all the auto-nonsense Microsoft throws at people. It's the only way to get anything accomplished.
I can't count the number of times I do one thing, such as put in a tab stop on one line, and Word thinks I want to do it to every line thereafter. Did I tell you to put in a tab stop on the next line? No? Then don't do it!
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If its anything like my tablet, auto correct will be turned back on every time there is an update.
N00bs. (Score:2)
Obsoleting the user is so primitive.
Why go through all that effort, to make that "product"?
You're like Apple.
Softbank et al are way further!
Just take the *customer* entirely out of the equation!
(He's poor now anyway, cause you already got all his money!)
1. Create vapor startup.
2. Declare "valuation". (Like $3 trillion.) You just created money out of thin air!
3. Buy shit with "parts" of that imaginary money!
Just make sure you never cash out!
Just sell the shit you bought with the imaginary money for real mone
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2.a. Learn that no one knows of your vapor startup and won't buy any of your stock.
3.a. Someone does buy your stock, you buy other things and then sell them then that someone wants to cash their stock in and you don't have the jing.
Privacy (Score:1)
Congratulations, Microsoft. You figured out a way to upload the content of users' documents to your server now. The EULA will surely say "the data you willingly transmit to Microsoft will only be used to help improve Microsoft products and services, or in accordance with our privacy policy."
More material for Elise Ecklund (Score:3)
Back in 2019, Elise posted a song on Youtube based on the predictive text Apple provided: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DwAIsFbBSE [youtube.com]
Apparently watermelons will take over. I wonder how crazy that will get with Microsoft's predictive text.
Finally! (Score:2)
We will just type a beginning phrase and Word will do the rest.:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, I am an invisible man, call me Ishmael...
Fck you once & fck you twice & fck you onc (Score:3)
Old song. Most of the younger ones won't get it.
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>I'll type my own damn words.
The uneducated and stupid are going to have the computer do it for them so they can present themselves as better educated and smarter than they are.
And it'll work well enough to get their foot in the door and even to hold on to a position once they're in. The ability to write coherently will become a less valued skill for a lot of jobs.
Most people barely care about education except as hoops to jump through to get a job. This hoop just got easier for them, and the human race
No Thank You... (Score:3)
Will that be as annoying (Score:2)
Compose host Jim's Is This that ate Always wrong." (Score:4, Informative)
"Oh crate, now that means phat cow I cang compose host Jim's is this with the predictive words that ate Always wrong."
Google has gotten *worse* and *worse* as they expand the vocabulary beyond common usage words.
Google *regularly* inserts obscure or even foreign words instead of the ordinary vocabulary word it should be using over the last 12 months. To make things worse- it *continues* to change the words so even when the text is correct- it may suddenly change it right as I post. It also insists on randomly capitalizing any words that are movie or book titles.
In cases it's not obvious... the first sentence is the raw output of google voice.
Three to four years ago it was *really* useful. But it had a much smaller vocabulary and a much better sense of what words were common and what words were rare. I don't even recognize some of these words like "thinj". I suspect it's accidentally or intentionally being trained with nonsense words. On my latest phone, it insists on inserting "oh" before comma's. So a list of words oh, adverbs oh, and nouns looks like this.
Microsoft and Google need to get more humans back in the loop. They are depending too much on self training without proper guidance.
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To see what happens ... (Score:2)
Yes I am that you can get the encrypted file is still in town? I'm going shopping for tomatoes. Would you want me to feed the cats this is going on. Don't worry I hope you got a start to evolve flippers and I are thinking about hiking with you. Furthermore, and that's what time are you leaving? Twenty minutes of you journeying through it was odd an
Typed a 'H' and Word turned it into LOTR (Score:3)
Who needs Tolkien if Word can do it.
Good opportunity for Clippy TTS (Score:2)
A great way to improve this would be to bring back Clippy as a virtual assistant and have him verbally try to complete your sentences for you as you type.
I saw this movie (Score:2)
Damned predictive text (Score:1)
Took them long enough (Score:1)
Not everyone looks at the screen as they type (Score:2)
Hopefully they will use Tay (Score:2)