I am really bad at spelling. I always have been and the older I get, my ability to spell things correctly only gets worse. Often my attempts are so bad that the spelling suggestions fail because I am not even close. I started playing around with seeing how well ChatGPT could guess what I meant and was pretty impressed at how it got the right answer basically every time.
Sure I was using a gallon of water and a bunch of carbon to put i before e but at least I’d found a solid application for LLMs I can use every day.
I decided to build this in as a Chrome plugin. I got ChatGPT to build the boilerplate for the plugin to get me started. The basic idea is you highlight some text and then send that text to the model along with a problem like “Fix the spelling in this:” and take the result and paste in over the selected text. It actually worked pretty great so I decided to expand the plugin to let me choose between different prompts like. Fix Grammar, Fix Spelling, Replace with Summary etc. That last one made me realize that sometimes I don’t really want the replacement part, I just want to quickly run the selection through the chatbot and show the answer in a window.
The UX is basically a right click menu you get when you have selected text:
The first three replace text and the last three popup a window with the result. The Explain Jargon one is pretty nice because it is really good at figuring out acronyms from the context. The prompt is basically:
"Please explain any acronyms or jargon in the following. Return the results as a html formatted bullet list:"Explain Overall is like summary but is often giving me something more useful when I am trying to understand something. The prompt is:
"Please explain what this is trying to say:"I haven’t tried to release the plugin but its pretty easy to make one. I think its a good illustration of how in specific limited cases you can make nice use of these LLMs. I don’t feel that great though about the water and the carbon.
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