The advanced cloud spell checker takes context into consideration

Sep 2, 2011 13:10 GMT  ·  By

The spell check feature in Google Chrome is about to get a major update, as Google plans to start using the technology that powers the "Did you mean" feature on Google.com for the spelling suggestion in the Chrome context menu.

It may be a while before the change goes live, it's still in early development, but the implications are quite big.

The spell check feature in Google Chrome is less than great and could do with an upgrade.

Spell checking in browsers in general isn't particularly advanced, one big issue is that it does not look at the context, it does a simple dictionary check for each word.

Google's spell checking feature in its search engine is much more advanced and uses several clues to determine what the user intended to write.

"This change integrates the Spelling service (a.k.a. 'Did you mean') to a context-menu of Chrome so we can see the spell-check result retrieved from the Spelling service," a code patch for Chromium reads.

"This change sends a JSON-RPC request to the service in the background and update a context-menu item while showing to prevent junkiness," it explains.

The idea is solid, from a quality point of view, but it remains to be seen if a spell checker that gets its data from the web can be as fast as a built-in one.

Work is underway in improving the code to the point where it can be shipped to millions of users. At least at first, the advanced spell checker may only be available to Google Chrome users and not Chromium ones.

Chromium, the open source version of the browser, has fewer links to Google in general and users may appreciate not having yet another feature that sends their data to Google, even if it's to improve spell check accuracy. [via GoogleOS]