Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

http://trevorah.github.com/backseat-writer

by trevorah • 13 years ago

17 16 13 years ago

trevorah.github.com

trevorah7• 13 years ago

Opinions?

Shish2k• 13 years ago

So it's a full-sentence auto-completer? Interesting; would be nice if it would wait for a whole word (or at least a second without typing) before completing though

trevorah7• 13 years ago

Good idea. I think waiting for a second would give a little more control to the typist.

fruchtose2• 13 years ago

It seems to be buggy? There were 9 JavaScript errors in the process of typing, "How do I compare thee to a summer's day?" (I know that's not the original text of the sonnet.)

trevorah7• 13 years ago

Yeah, only listing the top 10 chars to write next results in a few misses. Its also bit of a pain to test a recursive function that uses random numbers.

DividesByZero2• 13 years ago

Is this intended to produce 'sounds like' gibberish or structured sentences? Just curious at the end goal.

trevorah7• 13 years ago

Gibberish I guess. Doing a lookahead for letters was how I started, and its kinda interesting to see how it turned out as a quick project. Storing the probabilities for each letter given a string prefix is the limiting factor, and took a bit of effort to get it to reasonable size for a browser. I think using words instead of letters may result in better sentences with the same amount of space though...

andreasvc2• 13 years ago

What is it supposed to do? I try to type a sentence but it is immediately garbled by random words. If there were two boxes, one for input and output, things wouldn't get mixed up, or perhaps a "Shakespearize" button. Right now the edit box is not really usable because the script interferes with normal editing.

EDIT: Another note, while the references to Shannon & Markov chain are correct, in NLP this would more commonly be referred to as a character n-gram model.

trevorah7• 13 years ago

It's meant to interfere with your writing, like a backseat driver interferes with your driving. Your idea of separation is interesting, do you see it as a kind of translator?

pbhjpbhj• 13 years ago

Looks like it produces a lot of spam blog comments ...

mlader• 13 years ago

Happy April Fools Day to you too =D

Show HN: Backseat Writer – write like Shakespeare and others

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