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Comment by nicoburns | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see better open source spell checking. The state of the art spell checkers (in say, MS Word or Google Search) are excellent and more than good enough for my needs. And yet the spell checkers in browsers (e.g. Chrome and Firefox) and other apps tend to be terrible only catching very basic cases and often not being able to suggest the correct word.

Does anyone have any insight into what's holding this back?

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I integrated JSymSpell[0] into KeenWrite[1], which is based on SymSpell[2]. The algorithm provides numerous suggestions for "plannin'", with "planning" being the first hit[3]. Despite the English lexicon[4] not including all words for all localizations (US/UK) the results have been adequate for my use so far.

What open-source solutions have you been using that aren't working as well as you'd like?

[0]: https://github.com/rxp90/jsymspell

[1]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/

[2]: https://github.com/wolfgarbe/SymSpell

[3]: https://i.ibb.co/Bs0W6w2/screenshot.png

[4]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/tree/master/src/main...

The state of the art models these days would not be able to be bundled with browsers. These are typically neural models [0] and require specialized hardware to run, and also have high memory requirements. The models in browsers are light-weight to be able to run on most devices. Might be similar to those used in smartphone keyboards like GBoard [1].

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/speller100-zer..., https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/g-suite/everyday-ai-b...

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2021/10/grammar-correction-as-you-...

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