Last month, Google Labs released an interesting new tool called Scribe, which promises to autocomplete text while you’re typing it. And boy oh boy, does it ever deliver on that promise. Given a few words, Scribe uses Google’s immense database of collected human writing to “guess” the next word you intended to type. Assuming you were typing something that somebody else on the Internet had typed before, chances are good that Scribe would be able to properly complete words without you explicitly typing them.
But things really start to get fun when you stop guiding its decisions. By just pressing Enter to accept the first suggestion in the list, Scribe essentially becomes a Markov Chain text generator, which can create sentences where small groups of words seem to make logical sense, but the text as a whole is one long, incoherent run-on sentence.
I entered the name of our esteemed editor, Robert Quigley, and blindly accepted every subsequent word suggestion. This is where Scribe took it:
“Robert Quigley and Chris Coleridge are one of the most important thing is to begin within the next few years and 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 the surface of these cells to their cognate receptors on the cell surface and then they will become more apparent from the following detailed description of these properties are not well understood and therefore not available for this item is available online at the comfort of your home close to your family and friends together for another year of amazing pictures online featuring the world famous Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus for Blind and Visually Impaired Children Committee, therefore, that there is anything you would not believe how much I loved them all 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 […]”
It’s actually fascinating to read, as the corpus of text it bases its decisions on is so rooted in Internet culture. You know, being generated from text on the Internet and all. I lolled when it briefly channeled Kanye West.
Trust me, this thing is immensely fun to play with. After a few minutes to make those updates are not sent to the poster of the Advisory Committee!
You heard me.
Published: Sep 8, 2010 02:51 pm