I’ve been thinking lately about the future of word prediction (and phrase and sentence prediction). We’re at a point now where, without the user typing a single letter, but instead just selecting predicted words, syntactically and semantically coherent messages can emerge. This is obviously a huge boon for anyone who needs help typing and actually knows the meanings of the predicted words and what they want to say with them.
But what about those who don’t? What about all those individuals with autism who use AAC not because they have problems with motor control, but because they have problems with language? How do we know that someone isn’t simply selecting words at random that they don’t understand? Worse, given how text-prediction software can adapt to the styles and content of particular users, how do we know that the AI hasn’t been trained through earlier sessions that were mediated through on…
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