Silktide customers can now ask AI to automatically review most of their spelling issues, saving time on manual review.
Until now, all automated spell checkers have gaps in their knowledge.
Most English dictionaries have about 200,000 words, but that is far short of what you’ll find on the Internet.
Silktide has long spell checked English with over 5 million words, to cover people names, place names, companies, and more, but even those 5 million words have not been enough to cover everything.
Today we’re pleased to introduce a novel solution, which we believe is the first of its kind.
AI-powered spell checks
Silktide can now augment its spell checker with AI, to classify and validate spellings which are not found in a fixed dictionary.
For example, words like:
- Googling, Photoshopped – words derived from company names
- Khloé – name with unconventional but valid spelling
- orthonormalization – technical term from linear algebra
This isn’t just for English. German, for instance, has the ability to create almost infinite words due to its agglutinative nature, where short words are combined to form highly specific meanings.
Silktide can handle these too, even if they’ve never been written down before:
- Staubsaugervertreterbesuch – “Vacuum cleaner salesperson visit”
- Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän – “Captain of the Danube steamship company”
- Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz – “Beef labeling regulation delegation law”
How it works
Silktide still uses the same spell checker, but when AI spell checking is enabled, it performs an additional step on any unrecognized words.
These are checked individually via an LLM (Large Language Model), to classify them against the expected languages in the website.
Among other things, Silktide attempts to identify clear dictionary words, proper nouns, words from other languages, and clear mistakes.
Words which have never been seen before, but which could be correct (e.g. invented brand names, like “Fizzbuzz”) will be classified as ‘potential’ issues, instead of definite issues. Proper nouns are considered correct.
Any other changes?
When AI spell check is enabled, we now show a new “Language” column next to any spelling errors, for the Spelling screen.
This new column indicates the language of the misspelling, where we are confident that we can guess it.
This can be used to identify where a website is using languages that were not expected. You can filter spellings by this new column if you wish.
How is your data used?
You are unaffected unless you have opted in to this feature.
Any unrecognized spellings that our normal spell checker doesn’t recognize are shared with a third party LLM provider (OpenAI). The words are provided in isolation, out-of-order, and always represent a very small fraction of the text on a page.
We purposely only send individual words, and exclude email addresses, URLs, numbers, and anything that appears to not be a viable natural word (e.g. long strings of text, or code).
By approximation, think of this as asking an AI to review the list of errors that a spell checker normally shows you, and asking it if they are false positives.
You can learn more about how your data is used by AI here.
How to use it
Your organization needs to opt-in to this feature. An Account administrator should go to Account settings, and check the new “AI spell check” box.
Once applied, you need to retest a website for it to take effect.
