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In fact popular IMEs like Sogou do this and also get updated to recognize names of famous people, movies, etc.

You can even type abbreviations for common phrases, like "cflm" and it'll figure out you meant chi-fan-le-ma 吃飯了嗎

Oh, that's interesting. Back in the day when I wrote that tool all the IME tools I found and tried that were able to understand pinyin expected you know the correct character but lacked support for any kind of verbal cue (definition, dictionary) about which is the correct character with the intended meaning.

Current input methods are based on large corpora and use context to disambiguate. They are surprisingly smart.

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