Gadgetory

maybe you've seen some of the predictive text memes online where you start with a writing prompt and let your phone keyboard finish the rest type I was born and then let your predictive write your autobiography all right let's see what I was born to do I was born to be a professional calculator player I was born to be a professional calculator picker it's true like so much of Tecton RI predictive text actually came from good intentions like helping us make less mistakes and type faster when we're texting but from what we've seen of the means online we also know that there's some pretty creative use cases you've probably seen the work of botnets to do is online like this parody Coachella lineup poster made up of fake band names generated by AI they actually have a tool online that lets anybody make predictive text means and I'm gonna show you how to do it the tool that botner created is actually pretty similar to the predictive text on your phone but instead of a suggesting words and phrases that you often use you can upload a source text to help you sound more like a voice so for example if you uploaded a bunch of Yelp reviews and you type out the service was it'll suggest words like terrible or very good and I wanted to learn more about how this tech works so I called up bot next video CEO Jamie brew Markov chains which the basic assumption of a Markov chain is language is just a series of states and from each state you've got a bunch of options there's a limited number and when you take one of those options you move to another state so your current state might be a drink word sequence I went to and then you've got a bunch of options about where you go from the sequence I went to and one of those might be Paris and so you take the option that's called Paris and now you're in a new state called went to Paris and you've got a bunch of options and words that could follow went to Paris and one the important things about that model is that once it's moved past a word it totally forgets about that word that it used to be F and it only remembers the current state that you're in so as you're writing with your sentence and you're in the end of three words at the end of a 10 word sentence the model of language doesn't remember anything about what came at the start of the sentence and it's not using that information to guide the suggestions to come next it's really just like tunnel vision down to those three words that you're on right now and that's that's the core of how we assess words there's a little extra flavor that we throw in but it's surprising how much you get in terms of just like sounding like the text that you fit in just from something something as simple as let's look at the sequences sequences come right after that so but language often just works that way to make yourself understood you've got to start with a structure that people understand and then tweak it to show the specific meaning that you're Turner's brickster and comedy writing probably works that way even more than in regular writing but I think we're doing regular alright so now let's jump in and try bought an expert octave keyboard it's browser-based so it's really easy to get started they have a list of custom voices you can use but I'm going to go ahead and load in my own I got a list of Sanrio characters and their personality descriptions from the Wikipedia page so I'm gonna put that in and try to make my own Sanrio characters my makeshift Sanrio keyboard suggested words taken from the official character bios like aggressive and mouth 'less to create the names and bios for my new characters then i just drew them based on those descriptions the botnik predictive writer feels like an exercise and creative writing think of it as a tool rather than something that just dumps out a bunch of words because it's really a collaboration between you and a machine you can shell for your words around if you don't see anything you like or you can save a word if you see a particularly good one you can even combine two keyboards like the Sanrio characters with McDonald's item menus the best predictive keyboard creations have some kind of component like these fake boat names impose on kotas of real lifeboats or Photoshop ads for beef try it out for yourself and see what kinds of weird things you can make thanks for watching I want to see some of the weird stuff you've made so tweet them at me write them in the comments and be sure to check out our new YouTube channel verge science