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Start-up wants to enhance your adjectives

September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

TEL AVIV, Israel–One of the questions received at the help desk at White Smoke was “Do you eat sauce or do you drink sauce?”

The Tel Aviv-based start-up has come out with a service that aims to enhance the style and grammar of business letters, e-mails and other documents. Consumers write a document, send it to the company, and the company, through a computer program, sends back suggestions for stronger adjectives, improved grammar and style points, depending on the document being written.

Initially, the company targeted individuals who spoke English as a second or adopted language, but it turns out that 85 percent of the customers are native English speakers who want writing help, said Liran Brenner, vice president of research.

“It is something of a surprise,” Brenner said.

The company, which exhibited at an international summit being held here by Silicon Valley investment group Silicom Ventures, is part of a very small, but potentially growing, number of companies in Israel trying to target consumers directly. The majority of tech companies out of Israel are tech-heavy operations that provide chips or software to brand-name establishments, but the worldwide growth of the consumer market is piquing interest.

Instant messaging got its start here with ICQ back in the mid-1990s. ICQ co-founder Yair Goldfinger is an investor in WhiteSmoke. Goldfinger is now at a new start-up called Dotomi, which mixes instant messaging with Internet advertising.

Israeli venture capital firm Giza Ventures, meanwhile, will unfurl a game company in a few weeks, according to Chairman Zeev Holtzman. Another company, SecureOL, has started to market a virtualization application for PCs that’s designed to let consumers visit potentially risky sites safely.

“We (Israelis) are lousy at marketing,” said Zak Dechovich, CEO of SecureOL, explaining why the nation has to date not played much of a role in the consumer market.

WhiteSmoke’s software looks to improve documents in two ways. First, it runs a grammar and spell check, trying to find things missed by the standard tools found in e-mail and word processing applications. Second, it tries to achieve “text enrichment,” Brenner said.

The enrichment and grammar check are determined by the nature of the document. There are four different modules: legal, medical, commercial and literary. Thus, the software will provide different adjectives for “spleen” when the consumer wants to beef up a medical article, versus when “spleen” is used metaphorically in a literary piece.

“We’re coming out with a dating one next,” Brenner said. “We’ve had a lot of requests for it.”

The price ranges from $17.99 to $249, depending on how many modules a consumer wants. So far, the company has attracted about 50,000 customers and, surprisingly, a number have bought the $249 package that lets consumers check the document under all five different modules. (After the first year, consumers pay $16 a year to continue the service.)

The company has also begun to sell its software to Internet service providers, which in turn sport it as an added feature on their free e-mail services. A large ISP in Israel has already rolled it out, and one in the U.S. will launch it soon.

Potentially, the service presents privacy issues. Consumers, after all, do send in their word documents and e-mails to the company for advice. The documents, however, are reviewed by computers. Besides, “we’re too busy to go through things you send us,” Brenner said.

And the answer to the sauce food or drink question? It depends on the context, the company determined.

Posted by white smoke | Filed Under Accurate Spell Checker, Correct Grammar Software, Error Explanations, Grammar Correction, Grammar Software, Intelligent Style Checker, Writing Software, grammar checker, white smoke, white smoke review, whitesmoke, whitesmoke review 

Computer turns prosaic dunces into lyrical poets | Software claims to hone anyone’s written English

September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

It may come as a godsend to George Bush, John Prescott and any others who sometimes struggle to explain themselves in plain English. A computer software program claims that it can automatically turn garbled writing into clear and simple prose.

White Smoke, an American-Israeli company, says the new version of its ‘text enrichment’ software not only checks spelling and grammar but comes up with the word you are looking for when trying to finesse a legal form, a piece of creative writing or even a love letter.

The concept reopens the question of whether computers can truly ever simulate human culture. A decade ago Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat the world chess champion Garry Kasparov, but machines have fared less well at painting, poetry and music.

Futurologists have predicted that the next giant leap for the internet will be the ’semantic web’, which will be able to understand the meaning of words and their contexts, making search engines more precise.

Online writing tools already exist but attempts by computers to imitate language have often been clumsy and jarring.

White Smoke argues its system is different because it uses artificial intelligence to draw upon millions of examples of well-written English, then applies them to new contexts.

‘If you love language already, it would be like a calculator for a mathematician,’ said Hilla Ovil-Brenner, the founder and chief executive of WhiteSmoke. ‘But if you don’t write so well and want to sound more sophisticated, it works like a charm. It’s like a teacher who sits with you and reacts to your sentences. It can change the mood of your letter.’

White Smoke analyses text as it is being written, or at the user’s request, and suggests grammatical improvements, amends spelling and changes text.

It will switch ‘I don’t know weather the whether will be nice today or not’ to ‘I don’t know whether the weather will be nice today or not’. Common errors such as ‘Between you and I’ become ‘Between you and me’.

The software crawls news and business websites for common usage of English, then uses that knowledge to edit prose, based on the type of English style chosen, such as commercial, legal, medical, casual, creative or even flirtatious.

Does it work? Two prose styles put to the test

John Prescott

He said: ‘The objectives remain the same and indeed it has been made clear by the Prime Minister that the objectives are clear. And the one about the removal of the Taliban is not something we have as a clear objective but it is possibly a consequence that will flow from the Taliban clearly giving protection to bin Laden and the UN resolution made it absolutely clear that anyone that finds them in that position declares themselves an enemy and that clearly is a matter for these objectives.’

The computer: ‘The goals remain the same, and indeed it has been made apparent by the Prime Minister that they are clear-cut. And the objective about the removal of the Taliban is not something we have as an absolute, but it is potentially a consequence resulting from the Taliban evidently protecting bin Laden. The UN resolution made it absolutely explicit that anyone that finds themselves in that position affirms themselves an enemy and that clearly is a matter for these objectives.’

Verdict: Definite improvement

Robert Harris, from The Ghost

He wrote: I should have said, ‘Rick, I’m sorry, this isn’t for me, I don’t like the sound of it,’ finished my drink and left. But he was such a good storyteller, Rick – I often thought he should have been the writer and I the literary agent – that once he’d started talking there was never any question I wouldn’t listen, and by the time he was finished, I was hooked.

The computer: Altered some punctuation. But the original was otherwise fine.

Verdict: It’s good enough already.

Posted by white smoke | Filed Under Accurate Spell Checker, Correct Grammar Software, Error Explanations, Grammar Correction, Grammar Software, Intelligent Style Checker, Writing Software, grammar checker, white smoke, white smoke review, whitesmoke, whitesmoke review 

English improvement on Facebook!

September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment

White Smoke, maker of English Grammar and writing software solutions, has launched a new message composer application for Facebook.
The application is designed to be used as the first port of call for any message a user wants to send to Facebook friends. It enables the user to eliminate spelling and Grammar mistakes in the message.
Users can simply type messages straight into the White Smoke composer, check for spelling and Grammar errors, and press ‘continue’ to take the corrected text to the normal Facebook message composer.
The corrected text can also be copied from the White Smoke composer for posting in any number of other Facebook text areas, such as the ‘Wall’ or the ‘Super Wall’.
However, the Facebook application doesn’t bring the additional features of the WhiteSmoke desktop version such as writing templates, dictionary-thesaurus, and specialised text enrichment for different writing styles.
According to Hilla Ovil Brenner, chief executive officer of White Smoke, for years now, there’s been talk of instant messaging and SMS causing the quality of English Grammar to deteriorate, and even of school children using text-speak in the classroom and in essay assignments. Their internal research shows that errors occur in approximately 60 percent of text written online by the average Web user. Brenner believes that the new application can help improve this situation by providing an intuitive solution for Grammar checking that fits right in with the Facebook experience. The application will prove a useful tool to help keep English on track.
The WhiteSmoke message composer application is available to all Facebook users. Users have to simply browse applications for WhiteSmoke, and add them to their profile.
Source: IANS

Posted by white smoke | Filed Under Accurate Spell Checker, Correct Grammar Software, Error Explanations, Grammar Correction, Grammar Software, Writing Software, grammar checker, white smoke, white smoke review, whitesmoke, whitesmoke review 

WhiteSmoke 2009: World-Leading Software for English Writing

September 23, 2008 | Leave a Comment

mproved usability, new style checking features, and updates to the grammar checker give users a complete writing solution

White Smoke, Inc. – Wilmington, DE. September 22nd 2008 - White Smoke announces the immediate availability of White Smoke 2009, the latest version of its desktop English writing application. White Smoke 2009 is the premier writing tool for people who need quality written text, offering advanced grammar checking, style checking, and spell checking, based on natural language processing (NLP) technology. These core features are supplemented by English lessons, a comprehensive dictionary-thesaurus, and a range of document templates. The White Smoke 2009 release makes the White Smoke desktop application an even more essential tool for computer-based writing tasks on a PC.

“White Smoke 2009 brings our writing technologies to a new level of sophistication,” claims Hilla Ovil-Brenner, White Smoke CEO. “As a result of over 6 months of intensive user testing, we have made important changes to the interface to enhance usability, and incorporated many new algorithms to address writing style issues. White Smoke 2009 is a mature product for accurate proofreading and editing, whether you are a blogger, an at-home writer, or a corporate professional.”

New GUI

White Smoke 2009 introduces a new GUI with an improved workflow. Central to the new design is the presentation of White Smoke’s suggestions and corrections. Replacing the pop-up menus of White Smoke 2008, the user now receives corrections and suggestions in-line with the text, just like when a text is edited and proofread manually.”Our beta group is very pleased with this new development, which brings a more organic and ‘real-life’ feel to the writing and editing experience,” notes Liran Brenner, VP R&D at White Smoke. Other changes include the placement of the additional writing tools (English Lessons, Templates, and the Dictionary) above the text area, and more intuitive placement of the “Check” and “Apply” buttons.

Style Checker

White Smoke 2009 introduces a new collection of style checking features. The White Smoke Style Checker includes White Smoke’s patented Text Enrichment, a unique technology that has established White Smoke in a field apart from competitors, as well as a range of new features that address overall writing style. Users will be notified of incomplete sentences, use of slang and IM speak, and informal sentence structures. These additional style checking features make White Smoke 2009 a great leap forward from previous versions of White Smoke, and consolidate the White Smoke mission of creating an “all-in-one” writing tool.

Grammar Checker

White Smoke 2009 introduces new grammar algorithms and updates to existing algorithms. Key new detections include confusions between countable and non-countable nouns (much/many, less/fewer), comparative/superlative mismatches (more nicer, less nicest), and recognition of run-on sentences. Updates to existing grammar algorithms have further improved the precision of White Smoke’s corrections over a wider variety of possible sentence constructions.

White Smoke 2009 – An English Writing Tool with Wide Appeal

“For corporate professionals seeking to project the right image with quality writing, through to bloggers, creative writers and tens of thousands of at-home users, White Smoke 2009 represents the next step in the evolution of software to correct and enhance English writing,” states Amit Greener, VP Marketing at White Smoke. “With White Smoke 2009, anyone who writes in English has a comprehensive and intuitive tool to aid written communication, a tool that easily integrates with a user’s existing applications and preferred methods of working.”

About White Smoke

White Smoke is a world-leading company in the field of English writing technologies, with a focus on products that enhance and correct grammar, spelling, and writing style. In 2006, Business 2.0 ranked White Smoke 5th out of its “31 Best Business Ideas in the World”. White Smoke products are based on natural language processing (NLP) technology, featuring unique and patented artificial intelligence algorithms for text analysis. As well as the White Smoke 2009 desktop software, White Smoke makes its technologies available through other channels, such as an online, browser-based text editor (aimed at Mac users), and specialized OEM versions designed for integration with 3rd party service providers.

Posted by white smoke | Filed Under Accurate Spell Checker, Correct Grammar Software, Error Explanations, Grammar Correction, Grammar Software, Intelligent Style Checker, Writing Software, grammar checker, white smoke, whitesmoke 

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