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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

Chrome does the same thing for textboxes if you use enhanced spell checking.

>Enhanced spell check Uses the same spell checker that’s used in Google search. Text you type in the browser is sent to Google.

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Is there an actual example of what these "enhanced" spell-checkers provide over basic ones that run locally? To me it seems like spell checking is a problem that Word from over a decade ago solved well enough (and ran fine on that era's hardware).

A normal local spellcheck requires you to be much closer to the word than an "enhanced" one. As an example, if I search Google for "nucrusift" ("microsoft", but typed with my right hand one space to the left, a fairly common category of typo IME), it suggests a search for "Microsoft". The built-in spellcheck in Chrome (which I'm using to type this comment) does not offer any suggestions to correct "nucrusift".

iOS's local spell check suggested Microsoft.

I just tried for myself, and that was the keyboard's auto-complete, not the OS's spell-check, a subtle but IMO important difference. I think it's reasonable to expect the keyboard to catch that kind of typo, given it inherently has to do that kind of fuzzy logic to determine words anyway.

When I entered that same string into iOS Safari in a text box replying to your comment, deliberately bypassing the keyboard's auto-complete, it had no suggestions.

Marking unrecognized words, suggesting spellings, and auto correct are 3 different features if you want to split hairs. The distinction is not relevant to the claim a layout aware suggestion could not be produced locally.

I didn't say it could not be produced locally. I was just providing "an actual example of what these "enhanced" spell-checkers provide over basic ones that run locally." I'm merely speaking to what is, not what could be.

I didn't say you made the claim. It's funny how words we choose can imply things.

They use ngrams[0] and provide much more current dictionaries that won't flag non-dictionary words that are popular phases (think Urban Dictionary-like words/phases). The closest thing to something like Grammarly, Microsoft Editor, or Google's Enhanced spell check that you can run locally is Language Tool's local HTTP (java) server[1] combined with the Language Tool extension, and installing an ngram database[2]. But that won't give you the up-to-date phase information and you'll get red-squiggles under common phases that aren't dictionary words yet (e.g. Fluffernutter, Copypasta, Deplatform, et al).

Is it worth using these services given the privacy implications? Only you can answer that. I personally wish we had better local offerings, but I just don't think anyone wants to fund it when there's almost no revenue to be made.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-gram

[1] https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server.html

[2] https://dev.languagetool.org/finding-errors-using-n-gram-dat...

what about that newer dictionary cannot be provided by a download?

your browser probably updates itself every week or so.

there is absolutely nothing about these kinds of services that require running them on someone else's computer, save for conspiratorial reasons.

see also: machine translation (apple offline translate, firefox translations et al work just fine on your machine).

The difference is that Google has come under enough historical privacy flak that they now aggressively privacy red-team new functionality like this and do things like make it opt-in.

That seems new?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/privacy-whi...

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