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| WhiteSmoke Launches WhiteSmoke 2008 WhiteSmoke has announced the launch of WhiteSmoke 2008, an online text enrichment tool that encompasses the world's largest database of grammar, spelling corrections and text enhancements. This package allows users to enhance their written English instead of just processing it as most grammar and spell check programs do. WhiteSmoke has upgraded its software over four different areas: an improved user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface), a newly added on-the-spot notification feature, updates to the British English edition and enhancements to the grammar and punctuation engine. WhiteSmoke software analyses text on-the-fly or at the user's request and suggests grammatical improvements, amends spelling and enriches text through suggesting alternative or additional wording. The software currently proofreads over a million sentences a month through a user base of 50,000 people and works with popular word processing applications. WhiteSmoke is supported by an online database that constantly crawl the Internet news and business websites for common usage of English. It uses that knowledge to edit prose based on the type of English style selected, for instance commercial, legal, medical, casual, creative, executive and even dating. With a unique enrichment feature that scans your text and actually suggests adverbs, adjectives, and synonyms, writing is enhanced instead of just processed. WhiteSmoke Founder and CEO Hilla Ovil-Brenner comments on the GUI make-over: "We have improved our interface following user feedback. The GUI is now more user-friendly with easier to navigate menus and fewer buttons." Users are now also able to paste text directly into the WhiteSmoke window so that they can work on isolated sentences or paragraphs. Any changes made in the WhiteSmoke window are automatically reflected in the main body of text. WhiteSmoke 2008 version also introduces a new feature: the Notifier. This brings the user's attention to grammar and spelling mistakes as they type. "The user benefits from an on-the-spot pop-up window that alerts the writer to a mistake and suggests a correction. The user can either correct the error manually in the application or launch WhiteSmoke for automatic correction", says Liran Brenner, WhiteSmoke Vice President R&D. The Notifier further improves workflow and gives the ongoing writing process a more natural style for error detection and correction. This allows the user to pick-up on mistakes, which might adversely affect further chunks of text. "This added feature saves valuable writing time", adds Liran Brenner. Updates to the WhiteSmoke British Edition "Considering that 75% of WhiteSmoke users are American English native speakers, we were delighted when many potential customers from Great Britain and the Commonwealth approached us to release a British English edition", continues CEO Hilla Ovil-Brenner. "After months of R&D, we have developed advanced technology which provides British spelling variations (e.g. U.K. 'centre' Vs. U.S. 'center'), and also optional lexical items which vary across these two English language varieties (U.K. 'lift' Vs. U.S. 'elevator')." The company's technical team has continued to add new artificial intelligence algorithms, which now enable more accurate detection and correction of English writing errors. According to Vice President R&D Liran Brenner, "the most recent upgrades deal with verb tense inconsistencies, punctuation issues and false preposition use." The grammar modifications are coupled with the latest advances in the enrichment database. As the software algorithms constantly scan the growing text database, they add to the large variety of enrichment suggestions (more synonyms, adjectives and adverbs). write your comments about the article :: © 2007 Computing News :: home page |