14 DAY TRIAL // Google has quietly launched Google Scribe in Labs, a tool which auto-completes words and sentences as you type them. For regular PCs, the tool is a curiosity but not really useful. The technology however has many applications for mobile devices, smartphones, tablets and so on.
"Google Scribe provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a document, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe's suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use," the tool's help page reads.
In practice, the tool works surprisingly well. Just start typing and, in most cases, Scribe will suggest the words you were going to write. The tool only supports English for now, but there are probably plans to include other languages.
The Google Scribe editor hosted by Labs has some options, you can choose to always show suggestions or just when you press the tab key. It also works with several keyboard shortcuts.
But Google also offers a bookmarklet which could prove a lot more useful. It enables you to use Scribe with email clients, blogging tools and, basically, with any other text input box on the web.
Scribe is powered by technologies similar to Google Translate and the search suggestion box. By using statistical analysis of large bodies of text, Scribe can predict what are the most likely words that follow a certain combination.
Google Translate uses the same method to provide the most likely translation for a word or sentence.
Of course, just like with Google Translate, the system isn't perfect but it's good enough for most use cases.
The technology may still be experimental, but you ca expect it to be a big part of Google's offering for mobile products in the future.