Antidote 11: a neural motor for correcting, speaking and rhyming

On the occasion of his twenty-fifth birthday, the spell checker Antidote buys a brain. Antidote 11 incorporates a “Neural motor”The result of a collaboration with the team led by Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer in the teaching of deep learning at the University of Montreal. This engine, which “It forms the basis of the future development of Antidote”, already brings the insertion of the missing words.

This profound evolution is hidden by a facelift that updates Antidote. Square icon, generous margins, more secure typography, reduced toolbars, the interface is simpler and more flexible. With its blue sidebar, it is reminiscent of the web version, which incorporates all the new features of the native version.

The neural motor is probably the most important, but not yet the most sensitive. The computer druid agrees, she does ” first steps “ in the field of artificial intelligence, and does not want to deny “Natural intelligence” of ses infolinguistes.

While the machine takes care of missing word detection, humans have further improved textual analysis, especially in the detection of redundancies and cumbersome. Antidote is allowed to propose reformulations of the sentence, which can be applied with a click of the tooltip, a significant change in meaning.

The computer druid wants to find a compromise between the suggestions spread with the pacifier of the machine learning and the editor’s personal preferences. It is now possible to create sets of personal settings, combining the 215 available options, and modify the correction mechanics according to the writing context.

Using a word or phrase can trigger a rule that allows you to quickly identify difficult words, prohibited terms, or even automatically correct systematic errors. This data, like personal dictionaries, is synchronized with the Cumulix cloud service.

Antidote n’est pas qu’un correcteur orthographique: they are dictionnaire de définitions gagne 3 000 mots, dont «écoanxiété» et «vaccinodrome», et 20 000 exemples d’utilisation des prépositions, pour distinguishing «continuer à» from «continuer de» for instance. The Antidote + subscription adds a text-to-speech module that speaks words with accents. ” from Paris “ Where “from Montreal”.

A tenth dictionary also includes Antidote, that of rhymes. “Apple” obviously rhymes with “sum”, but also “palm” by allowing imperfect rhymes, and “prodigy” can rhyme with “say I” by activating multi-word search. Poets lacking inspiration can use the frequency and length criteria to find a word for their verse.

The English language module benefits from the same improvements as the French language, the neural engine this time takes care of replacing contractions and divided infinitives. Dictionary gains 5,000 words, words can be pronounced with accent ” From london “ Where “From Toronto”, and the rhyming dictionary takes into account the peculiarities of English prosody.

Subscription Antidote +, which also includes the web version and the mobile application, is offered at € 59 per year. The family offer with five users is shown at € 99 per year, and the English language module costs an additional € 30. Druide informatique offers a 50% discount for an upgrade from a previous version and keeps a perpetual license for the Mac / PC version at € 119.

In France, Antidote is marketed by Mysoft, which still distributes a boxed version with a 200+ page user guide. Mysoft also publishes the medical glossary, a dictionary that covers all medical disciplines, which this year exceeds 200,000 entries. The medical glossary is offered at € 219, or just € 40 for an upgrade from the previous version.