Historically, automated spell checkers had gaps in their knowledge. Most English dictionaries contain about 200,000 words, but that is only a fraction of the valid English words you can find online. Silktide has used a dictionary of over 5 million English words to help cover the names of people, places, and companies, but even this is not enough to cover everything. AI spell checking can help us fill these gaps.

Silktide uses AI to classify and validate spellings not found in a fixed dictionary. This is useful for words derived from company names (such as "Googling" or "Photoshopped"), names with unconventional but valid spellings (such as "Khloé"), or highly technical and specialized terms (such as "orthonormalization").

AI spell checking allows us to be more effective in checking other languages as well. As an example, several short German words can be combined to form infinitely many new words with highly specific meanings. Silktide can handle these, even if those words have never been written before. Examples could include:

We will still use the dictionary spell checking we have before. If AI spell checking has been enabled, we will use AI to double-check any unrecognized words. Words are checked individually via a Large Language Model (LLM) to classify them against the expected languages on the website.

Among other things, Silktide attempts to identify clear dictionary words, proper nouns, words from other languages, and clear mistakes. Words that have never been seen before, but which could be correct (e.g. invented brand names, like “Fizzbuzz”) will be classified as ‘potential’ issues, instead of definite issues. Proper nouns are considered correct.

When AI spell check is enabled, we now show a new “Language” column next to any spelling errors, for the Spelling screen. This new column indicates the language of the misspelling, where we are confident that we can guess it. This can be used to identify where a website is using languages that were not expected. You can filter spellings by this new column if you wish.

To begin, your account will not use the AI spell checker unless you opt in to using this feature. If enabled, any unrecognized spellings that our normal spell checker doesn’t recognize are shared with a third-party LLM provider (OpenAI). The words are provided in isolation, out-of-order, and always represent a very small fraction of the text on a page. We purposely only send individual words, and we we do not check email addresses, URLs, numbers, or anything that appears to not be a viable natural word (e.g. long strings of text, or code). In addition, our agreement with OpenAI ensures that your data will not be used to train their model.

You can learn more about how your data is used by AI here.

Your organization needs to opt-in to this feature. An account administrator should go into Silktide and select their profile icon in the top right of the screen. Select the "Settings" link in this menu, and find "Account settings" in the navigation from there. This page will contain a checkbox to enable AI spell checking. Once this is done, the next retest of each website will use the AI spell checking feature.