The Google labs service Google Scribe analyses the text that has been written by the user to give real-time word and phrase auto-suggestions. Scribe displays suggestions as soon as you start typing the first letter of a new word or phrase. Fast typing users won’t see Scribe suggestions when they use the provided bookmarklet, which outlines that not everyone is necessarily benefiting from Google’s new service.

Slow typers on the other hand, and users who use the Scribe online editor or Chrome extension, may very well benefit from Google Scribe, as it is sometimes possible to complete words faster, provided that the right suggestions are displayed in the Scribe interface or on the page.

Scribe comes with several keyboard shortcuts to speed up the workflow. Suggestions can be selected with the space or right arrow key and the mouse. A tap on Escape hides the suggestion window, and tab displays it again. The up and down keys can be used to navigate the suggestions. Google Scribe can be enabled and disabled at anytime with the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-J.

But where do you get Google Scribe? The software is provided as a Google Chrome extension, as a bookmarklet that is compatible with several web browsers and as a online text editor on the Google Scribe website.

It is probably easiest to try the service on the official website to see if it is something that you can work with and benefit from. Scribe is for instance not of real use for me since I’m typing to fast. The suggestion window barely opens, and when it opens it is usually at the end of a sentence or if I make a spelling mistake and have to stop writing to correct it.

The bookmarklet does not display a default suggestion directly on the page, at least not when I tried the service with the Firefox 4 browser. Only the overlay box with five word and phrase suggestions was displayed during tests. The Google Scribe online editor on the other hand displays only a default suggestion and not a suggestion’s box.

The Chrome extension finally combines default suggestions with the box of additional suggestions.

Google Scribe gets bonus points for having Ghacks and related terms in the dictionary.

The new version of Google Scribe supports additional languages, namely: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. (via)

Update: Google Scribe is no longer available as Google retired Google Labs.

Most auto complete features are on the other hand limited to the application they have been developed for which can mean that a user needs to get used to several of those auto completion tools which usually work slightly different.

That’s where Typing Aid might help computer users who need to use auto complete in multiple applications. The program runs in the background and is compatible with most, if not all, applications and text forms including web browser and text editors.

The program has a few compatibility options that need to be edited if the auto complete does not work out of the box. This was for instance the case in our Windows 7 Professional system. We had to edit the preferences file to change the compatibility mode from 1 to 3 to get it working in all our applications.

The words are taken from the wordlist.txt which can be filled with words by the user. The program supports unicode and works with accents. It has a learning mode that can be used to add words and phrases to the database.

Typing Aid will display possible matches for characters that are entered by the user. It begins by three chars initially which can be changed in the options. The possible matches are displayed in an overlay window that uses a numbering system for the options. The user can then use various hotkeys to select a phrase from the list to auto complete the typed chars.

Many settings of the program can be changed in the preferences file. Typing Aid can be downloaded from the developer’s website. It is a portable software program that works in Windows 7 and earlier Microsoft operating systems.

NK2View is a Nirsoft application that can be used to manage those stored auto complete entries in Microsoft Outlook. The software program is fully portable and should run on most versions and editions of Microsoft Windows. The name of the software is directly related to the file extension of the auto complete entries. Outlook stores them in .n2k files that are named after the profile name.

It displays the auto complete entries of the default Outlook profile by default with an option to load the auto complete entries of other profiles as well. Once loaded the software program lists information such as the email address, display name, the auto complete value or the type.

The auto complete entries can be edited and deleted which is useful for removing obsolete or incorrect entries from the auto complete file.

Users with multiple computers will like the option to export the entries into xml, html or txt format. The software program for Microsoft Outlook does come with another interesting option. It can be used to add information from the Microsoft Outlook address book to the auto complete entries.

Users should be aware that the auto complete limit is 1000 entries. They should backup the .n2k files before they make any chances to the files.

The second action is the auto-complete feature that kicks in under certain circumstances only be default. Entering Mozilla will load the mozilla.com website automatically because that is the best match in the Google search engine for that name. A search for www.mozilla on the other hand will be auto-completed by Firefox. The browser will append the .com suffix to the query and load the same website.

Not everyone is living in the United States and some users might prefer a country domain extension instead of the default .com suffix. This option can be changed in the Firefox preferences. Entering about:config in the Firefox address bar will load the preferences.

Filtering for the term fixup will show the four parameters on the screenshot above. A user can change the default prefix and suffix to something else by double-clicking the entries or disable the auto-complete feature completely by setting the browser.fixup.alternate.enabled parameter to false.

The Autocomplete Manager brings light into that chaos. Two of the most interesting features that it offers is to sort the list of urls differently. You can sort it to display the most frequently or most recently visited urls first or select to begin with top level pages first.

Another feature I like is that you can change the amount of suggestions that are shown, place bookmarks first, only consider typed in urls or add and remove history entries. If you do use the auto complete feature you really should take a look at this extension and install it on your computer.

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Autocomplete Manager
via Cybernet News