The original note, as written at the time
An AI feature that quickly recognises and notifies the user of uncommon words that have been used around him or in a document that he is interfacing with.
Ongoing development
An AI feature that quickly recognises and notifies the user of uncommon words that have been used around him, or in a document he is interfacing with.
It is a small idea and it is one of the most useful in this whole collection, because it addresses the actual reason people lose arguments and miss opportunities.
Nobody fails to understand a lecture because of the common words. They fail at the one word the speaker used assuming everybody knew it, and the room divides silently into those who knew and those who did not, and the second group never raises a hand. The same happens in a contract, a medical letter, a tender document.
The notification is the design problem. Interrupting a conversation to explain a word is intrusive and slightly humiliating, and a feature that makes a person feel stupid will be switched off within a week. So it must be silent and retrospective: collect the uncommon words, and present them afterwards, as a small list the user can open or ignore.
The business version is where it pays for itself. A junior reading a senior’s correspondence can learn the firm’s register in a month. A person moving between languages can see which English words are carrying the technical weight. And a writer can be told, gently, that a word they used three times in a paragraph is not as common as they think.
There is a nice inversion here. Most AI features try to write for you. This one only tells you what you did not know, and trusts you to do something with it.
A dictionary that notices what you actually encountered is worth more than one that lists everything.