I have not followed the conversation very closely so I'm not sure whether PhraseExpress was discussed in a positive light, but apparently it will be available at Bits du Jour in the coming days at 50% off: http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/phraseexpress-professional-edition

Hi.

I am ambivalent about PhraseExpress. It is very powerful - almost too powerful for my needs.
I recommend to take a look at some of the documentation videos - I misunderstood a few things in the beginning and asked the developer who took the time to explain and to point me to the documentation and the relevant videos.
What I like is the clipboard enhancer, though :-)

Franz

Review: "Best free clipboard manager — Ditto vs ClipX vs CLCL vs Clipboard Help+Spell"

http://tinyurl.com/amhcoyt

I've been fairly happy using the free WordExpander, however in some situations it does seem to slow down to the point of not being usable. It seems to be some sort of a conflict with another software but I haven't been able to work out which one. Windows Live Mail client is one suspect, Scrivener for Windows is another, AutHotkey yet another, or perhaps Chrome. After a system restart however things are back to normal. I only have 300 entries in WE, which seems fairly small to me, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Do any of the other text expanders have similar issues? Are there any that seem to be particularly resilient and unaffected in performance regardless the size of the phrase database and the number of other software open?

This may be the nature of the beast. I use PhraseExpander and previously its predecessor Direct Access, and in both cases starting up The Brain or Quickbooks disabled the software, so I have to close and reopen it. This has been the case on two computers and three Windows platforms, so I have had to learn to live with it ...

Graham

Hi.

I have been using PhraseExpress for 3 months and haven't experienced significant problems (smaller glitches, yes, but nothing I could reproduce).

Franz

I love the power of Phraseexpress. It does just what I need...when it works. It's been a struggle keeping it functioning and I'm beginning to wonder if it's worth the effort.

1) It stops working, a lot. Maybe some other program is shutting it down but it just stops making corrections even though the program is still running. I have to kill the process and re-start it.

2) One of the things I liked is that it came with a long list of automatic corrections. This was a big time saver. It takes a considerable amount of time to define the correction for each typo. But in a recent upgrade, all the definitions were corrupted, and instead of entering a correction when I make a mistake, it simply deletes the word. By the time I see what's happened I've already typed another word, so I have to back up and re-type the word it deleted. To make it stop doing that, I have to go into settings and add the correction that got deleted. 99% of the corrections I need are for simple typo's, usually transposing two letters. There are 100,000 ways you can transpose letters in words. Having to manually define a correction for each one is not worth the time.

3) It does weird stuff and its hard to figure out why. It recently started capitalizing all the typo corrections. If I typed "teh", it corrected it to "The". I put up with that for a while. When I upgraded to the latest version I was happy to see that it had stopped doing this. That lasted for about a week. Now it has started changing corrections to all caps (teh = THE).

I know I can contact support about these issues, and I will, but I have little confidence that that will be the end of the troubles.. I just want something that runs in the background and works. I'm starting to think PE isn't it. It used to put up pop-ups telling me how much time I'd saved using PE but it's stopped doing that. Maybe its embarrassed.

Of course, these problems may be peculiar to my system, and not the fault of PhraseExpress.

Wayne

instead of entering a correction when I make a mistake, it simply deletes the word.

I had that phenomenon about 4 times. The last 2 times, it was an English autocorrection entry that deleted a German word (why it didn't simply replace it with the English word - I don't know).

I'm a decent speller, so I rarely need to have a blatant misspelling corrected. 90% of my spelling mistakes are simple transpositions when I'm typing fast. I type "takign" instead of "taking". I suspect a lot of other people have the same problem. It'd be nice to have a program that had pre-loaded corrections for the majority of these simple transposition errors. PhraseExpress had a good number covered until I did the update and ended up with so many blank definitions.

You can't every fix transposition error automatically because in some cases the error is a valid word.

My other common spelling error is hitting two keys at THE same time and having the wrong letters inserted. It might be asking too much to have a program cover those, too. There are probably too many possibilities. By the way, notice the all caps "the"? PhraseExpress did that.

Wayne

Dr Andus wrote:

I've been fairly happy using the free WordExpander, however in some
situations it does seem to slow down to the point of not being usable.
It seems to be some sort of a conflict with another software but I
haven't been able to work out which one. Windows Live Mail client is one
suspect, Scrivener for Windows is another, AutHotkey yet another, or
perhaps Chrome. After a system restart however things are back to
normal.

Adobe Flash Updater is another suspect. Quite often when WE slows down and a lag develops between typing, I restart my system, and lo and behold, Adobe Flash pops up with a new update...

Anyone interested in this kind of 'snippet management' software might want to try Text Paster, featured today in Bits du Jour:
http://www.bitsdujour.com/software/text-paster

Please don't consider this as any kind of recommendation, I do not use this kind of software myself.

After about 9 mo. with WordExpander, I reached a dead end with it. Currently I'm putting PhraseExpander through its paces, and planning to summarise my experience in a review in 3 months' time.

I'm focusing on PE for academic uses (qualitative research and writing), which is likely to differ from how medical doctors use it. But if anyone is curious about any particular aspect, let me know, and I'll try to cover it in the review.

More here:
http://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/10/06/from-wordexpander-to-phraseexpander/

I got tired of PhaseExpress not working and having to restart it to get it to work, i.e. to insert the autotext when I typed in the appropriate abbreviation.

I have switched over to AutoHotKey for entering "hotstrings". I keep my .ahk file in Dropbox so that my hotstrings are available on all my computers. I just learned the bare minimum to get it up and running Working very well for me.

p.s. a hotstring is inserted into the .ahk file just like this:

::oswc::outlinersoftware.com

I also stopped using PhraseExpress: Too many strange encounters of the 3rd kind.
When this project is over, I will retry AutoHotkey, for the moment AutoCorrection in Word and Outlook suffice.

Franz

jimspoon wrote:

I have switched over to AutoHotKey for entering "hotstrings". I keep my
.ahk file in Dropbox so that my hotstrings are available on all my
computers.

That sounds like an interesting solution. The thing is I really like the drop-down box approach (starting to type the actual word and then choosing from the list, rather than having to memorise shortcuts), and though apparently there is even a way to make it work on AutoHotkey, e.g.

http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/49517-typingaid-v219d-word-autocompletion-utility/

when I read the "known issues" and the comments, it just puts me off, as it sounds like there is a lot of extra fiddling involved. Hence my preference for a solution that works out of the box with minimal hassle...

Except for drop-down lists to choose from (which I never got accustomed to, in text expansion tools, but of which I understand the utility if you are willing to fiddle with them), the only "problem" with AHK is the lacking speed of "changing things", which for text expansion interferes very often. So for using AHK for this, you should do a little macro in the way of:

control-something opens the respective terms list
there, you enter the new term, or change some existing term
escape will close the list and save it "over" the existing one ("reload this script")

These some lines would give you access to your AHK text expansion list as easy as in any (good) commercial tool, AND you will be able to have several such lists, for several such uses, both alternatively or even concurrently.

But I think it's interesting to hear that Bartels doesn't seem to be too eager to eliminate bugs, since his program is one of the most expensive ones on the market? He just answers questions from paying users, which I understand (even if it's rare for a developer to impose such a condition), but I had thought that bug reports from those paying users were properly processed?

Interesting examples there, with

comp
-etition
-arative
-etitor

etc., since I'm almost certain that almost everybody, with such examples in a drop-down list, will make my experience with such: That selecting and triggering the right entry there takes both more time and more effort than just typing the needed 5 or 6 characters of the intended word. Of course, dictation is the best text expander in the end, and most often-used words are short, and often rather similar, e.g. der, die, das, which you could perhaps abbreviate d, e, a, or "i" for "is", in English, t for the, th for there, ts for this, tss for these, wr for were, ws for was, and so on, but you will quickly find that there ain't so many possibilities, with very short abbreviations, for such words.

But in your work, there will be special, recurring words, and here, it's important to really abbreviate them: If you need them very often, you should do it by real short abbreviations; if it's variants, you should have standardized "second parts" of your abbreviations, which could facilitate your memorizing compound words, and why not, competi,n could be competition, and satisfac-n could be satisfaction, such "-n" being "tion", similar for other endings. Btw, AHK helps a lot here, since you can put your abbreviations into different groups where different end/expension trigger characters will apply; only few commercial tools offer this flexibility.

In the end, you'll see that you will have rather few abbreviated standard terms, which really help you in typing faster, but too much fiddling with text expansion is counter-productive, just typing often being faster.

But I think it's interesting to hear that Bartels doesn't seem to be too
eager to eliminate bugs, since his program is one of the most expensive
ones on the market? He just answers questions from paying users, which I
understand (even if it's rare for a developer to impose such a
condition), but I had thought that bug reports from those paying users
were properly processed?

When I talked to Gunnar Bartels about some problems he pointed me to the right solution.
But the problems I had before I stopped using PE where a) not reproduceable and b) extremely complicated to explain (and one of my jobs is explaining how to use software). So, when I had to reinstall Windows and my applications on my PC, I decided not to install PE again. I do miss some of PE's features but not enough ...

Franz

I'm still working up to my PhraseExpander review but I just wanted to point out that the latest version (3.9.6) released today has a new algorithm which optimises its "SmartComplete" feature (drop-down selection box at the cursor) for two types of users:

1) those who want to keep typing and keep narrowing down the list that way, until the desired word is at the top (and then use the confirmation key), through perfect (as opposed to fuzzy) front-end matching of letters;

2) or those who want to type a couple of letters, and then type the last (or any other) letter of the word already showing up somewhere in the list, to make the desired word jump to the top of the list.

E.g. I can type "con" and the list "concept, conception, conceptual, conceptually" shows up in a drop-down box. Now I could use the arrow key to go to "conceptual", or click on it with the mouse.

But with option 2, I could also type "conl" (first 3 + last letter of "conceptual", and that word jumps to the top of the list, and then I just hit the confirmation key (Tab key for me).

This solves the only problem I've had with PhraseExpander so far (otherwise it's been working great): it didn't have perfect front-end matching, as the fuzzy matching tried to guess the whole word on the basis of the first few letters typed, and displayed not so relevant matches (e.g. typing "con" would bring up "competition" at the top of the list), as the software was geared towards users who memorise shortcuts.

But this new feature now relieves me of the cognitive burden of having to remember hundreds of shortcuts (or having to keep typing more letters for better matches). I have 536 phrases in my main glossary and there is no way I'd want to memorise that many shortcuts...

Of course it's still possible to use the memorised shortcuts method as well, so I guess that would be the 3rd type of user.

just looked at the webpage, $55.95 is pretty steep!

Your description gave me an idea; perhaps it has already been implemented by somebody.

A utility could monitor text that is input, and record commonly used phrases into a database. (No need to manually create a database of autotexts and abbreviations).

Then, while typing, when you want to insert any one of those commonly used phrases - you might type in a keystroke that signals the utility "i want to insert one of my commonly used phrases. use the following keystrokes to find that phrase for me." I often use the forward slash "/" for that purpose.

Now just start typing parts of that phrase - with spaces to signify an AND condition. A popup list would show all commonly used phrases that match the entered query. Just for example - suppose you wanted to enter the commonly used phrase "big mac with fries", this would come up as an option if you typed in "bi fr ac".

I find files in just this way using Voidtools Everything - searching for strings that appear in the filename.

jimspoon wrote:

just looked at the webpage, $55.95 is pretty steep!

Then you're in for a surprise, because the SmartComplete feature I was talking about is only available in the PRO version, which is USD139. 95 ;)

Your description gave me an idea; perhaps it has already been
implemented by somebody.
A utility could monitor text that is input, and record commonly used
phrases into a database. (No need to manually create a database of
autotexts and abbreviations).

The AutoHotkey script I linked to before has such a "learning" feature and it's free (I haven't tried it). But obviously it would be much more of a DIY experience:
http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/49517-typingaid-v219d-word-autocompletion-utility/

As for why these text expansion software are so expensive? One reason might be that they're mainly targeting medical doctors and business organisations who can afford them.

In the case of PhraseExpander, I'd say it's in the premium segment of the market (and from what I've seen so far, probably the best), so it would be difficult for it to price itself lower than its main competitor, PhraseExpress. And as for the others, none of them seem to have the SmartComplete-type functionality, which is the only thing that really interests me.

I'd say these kind of tools are for people who are not touch-typists (or who suffer from RSI) and who type a lot of repetitive and long phrases all day long, use complicated terminology that are easy to misspell (medication, chemicals, strings of computer commands etc.). It's probably the same people who also buy Dragon NaturallySpeaking (which is also not cheap).

But another way to look at it is that if this kind of text expansion software works for you, it would be *the* software that you use the most (besides your OS), because it literally monitors your every keystroke.

You both present very interesting concepts here I fully agree with.

As said, typing the whole word is often faster than to identify the term within the drop-down box, then activate arrow keys, or (if they are numbered, which is the case in some such programs) press "1" or "2" or "3", and this advice here:

"E.g. I can type “con” and the list “concept, conception, conceptual, conceptually” shows up in a drop-down box. Now I could use the arrow key to go to “conceptual”, or click on it with the mouse."

is a good example of what I mean, since those terms are not "complicated" enough in order to justify your hand switching from keyboard to arrow keys, let alone to mouse, and back. (Btw, you bring a good example for my syllabus advice: ion, tual, tually...)

But of course, as soon as the tool in question comes with some AI (or at least brings my concept to work), things get VERY interesting:

"But with option 2, I could also type “conl” (first 3 + last letter of “conceptual”, and that word jumps to the top of the list, and then I just hit the confirmation key (Tab key for me)."

This is almost perfect, the only point of "criticism" I would have is, how to avoid the trigger key in such examples? You could do it by the negative: If you type the "l", after the "con" will show the list, the tool "knows" you want "conceptual", and if you had some other word in mind, you would type some # and then something else - I know this brings a lot of additional problems...

Also, WHEN will the drop-down list appear: For any terms the tool has in its big lists, or just for words you often type? Here, real AI would come into play: It's imaginable that a text expander tool, just as a dictation tool, would be able to analyse your texts (even in groups), and then only presents you such "terms to choose from" for longer terms you really use (special vocabulary of your profession), and this would imply that it would not present any "improbable" term, since even READING this list within the drop-down frame takes much time.

Optimization is always possible: No presentation of anything else, but just 2 or 3 terms (or just 1), together with some very big "l" in the term so you know what the list will trigger then, and a very big "y" for the "conceptually" (and not an "ly" since the "l" would already trigger the "conceptual", without extra trigger key).

If you want to write something else, why not enter a dot? Since we are in the "middle" of such a "presented list", we can assume you are in the middle of a word, and not at the end of a sentence - such a system could be practical if it only showed you such lists for "special" words, and not 12 times for every line you type!

Further AI could go beyond analyzing your texts, from which analysis then it would constitute its "terms offerings" tailored to your texts, but it could go a step further and eliminate any "offered" where from the semantic context it could not apply: The tool could detect it's a noun that's needed here, not the respective verb, and if it was able to do so, the very SAME abbreviation could trigger the verb or the noun (and perhaps even without presenting a list to begin with).

Also, such more developed AI would be a thing from heaven for German users (I'm sure Mr. Bartels reads here, and if he can realize it, our money will ask to go for him !), since we have all those "flections" or whatever the linguist calls them, different word endings depending on all sorts of things... but which by AI would be detectable!

Just one example, it's not "the", it's "der, die, das" for the article, "die" being female or plural. Now if you begin to type a word that is not female, but if also there is a "die" before it, any tool could/should "know" that you want to type the plural form of the word you're typing, and in German, in many cases, that's not some simple end-s, but all sorts of different things, so this "guessing from context before" could be extremely helpful.

A last word: Nobody says that memorizing abbreviations is sensible. It's just that those drop-down lists take reading time, then take time for your reacting accordingly, so if somebody could optimize this concept, anybody would be happy with that!




Sorry, Jim, for replicating what you already said: "A utility could monitor text that is input, and record commonly used phrases into a database. (No need to manually create a database of autotexts and abbreviations)." And I should add, the tool should "judge" by frequency and by "complicatedness of typing it manually", but in the end, that seems a complicated task to accomplish, and then, I would like to have my say about what I'm expected to type! (But this could be resolved by "smart global replacement", meaning the tool would also check your corrections of what it wanted you to type for other instances of the same word components.)

"Then, while typing, when you want to insert any one of those commonly used phrases - you might type in a keystroke that signals the utility “i want to insert one of my commonly used phrases. use the following keystrokes to find that phrase for me.” I often use the forward slash “/” for that purpose."

This means, special trigger keys for special lists, from which to choose then. You can perfect this system by installing a tree of such lists... (And then, some - very basic, easy - AI - would bring up your real standard phrases onto the very first page of this list collection.)

"Now just start typing parts of that phrase - with spaces to signify an AND condition."

This is a brilliant concept which can be further developed: Whenever you type something devoid of sense (in the language the tools knows you are currently typing in), for example "as" in German, the tool knows the dot, or the space, or the comma, or many other such readily-available characters, cannot be a regular trigger key, and isn't end of word or of sentence (part) either, but must be something special (again in several "lists", depending wheter it's a dot, space, comma...), and so it will "do something predictable" about it.

Btw, there is a medical text expansion program costing around 500 dollars if I remember well (so Bartels stuff is not THAT expensive really!) - unfortunately, you won't get a trial without their knowing your name, address, tel number, etc., and they even phone you in order to check!

But it would certainly be of interest to know what really expensive text expanders might do "on top" of what we know from them.

Dr Andus wrote:

I'm still working up to my PhraseExpander review but I just wanted to
point out that the latest version (3.9.6) released today has a new
algorithm which optimises its "SmartComplete" feature (drop-down
selection box at the cursor)

I've written a more detailed explanation of how the new PhraseExpander algorithm works:

http://drandus.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/phraseexpanders-new-algorithm/

The key point is that the SmartComplete box gives you a visual clue as to what shortcut to type in order to select the desired word, which is much more useful (to me at least) than having to memorise the shortcut, and it also obviates the need to use the arrow key.

In the meantime I also came across another software that has a popup box feature (though I haven't tried it yet):

http://www.smartype.com/index.html

But as I said, the popup thing seems to be a premium feature, as this one is roughly in the same price band (USD 120-150).

Dr Andus wrote:

jimspoon wrote:
>just looked at the webpage, $55.95 is pretty steep!

Then you're in for a surprise, because the SmartComplete feature I was
talking about is only available in the PRO version, which is USD139. 95
;)

PhraseExpander Pro is available at a 50% discount ($69.95) until Mon 2 December 2013 at 23:59 PST here:

http://www.phraseexpander.com/black-friday-discount-2013/

Two things:

It's 55,50 euro PLUS vat, and so we have got here another example of not-totally correct dollar-vs-euro conversion.

But I also would like to say that both "Dr Andus" ' intervention at the developer and his blog article about the results, and the developer further developing his tools, are of admirable brilliance, and that the results cannot be underestimated; I think this has been a decisive step in the right direction.

Some remarks, all perfectly minor in comparison:

- I'm not happy with the tab key as the trigger key, should be any key, e.g. the one between my "jklöä" and my return key?
- I'm not happy with the pop-up window always appearing. I understand that it should appear when you cannot be sure yet, but in (almost) unequivocal cases, the tool should just type the full word, without any list popping up
- the same for the trigger key being needed

Now how could this be achieved? Perhaps this way:

We are in face of "learning software" - as said, the relevance of this cannot be underestimated. Now if the tool has any doubt since there are several possibilities left, with your typing, it will pop up the list, and in the form "Dr Andus" describes, meaning presenting it by presumed order of "chance" for the terms it deems possible here (this presumes some terms might not be yet within the respective "sub-vocabulary" yet), but if the tool has learned, from your previous use, that your key combination would indicate some of your "standard" terms, let's say a word you will have selected at least twice from the list, even when technically there would be another alternative (but which you did not select once), the tool should simply enter this exact term, even at the risk of "guessing wrong".

Of course, whenever such a guess is wrong, so that you must correct it (there should be, and probably is, a dedicated key combination to trigger this), the tool should then choose other "completing characters" for the lesser (or not-at-all) used words that theoretically might apply, and there should be "completion char" selection by frequency, and even by easiness of typing (and this from start on), which means that for frequently-used words (= for new users, the tool should analyse the texts you will have written without using it), the tool should select completion chars that will come "naturally", on a standard keyboard (ultimately, even USA/GB/D etc. vs. F/E/I etc.), i.e. which can by typed by another finger, and/or by your other hand, and in the same line of thought, less frequent words (in YOUR texts) should ask for longer shortcuts than words you'll be in need of again and again, even if they are "rarer" from a general-frequency statistical pov.

Once, I read somebody saying that this Nagarsoft product wasn't but a paid replica of another, free program. It seems they have come a long way from that possible starting point, if it ever was true. Congrats!

Of course, any such tool (and of which in this case the possibilities are much broader than text expansion in AHK is) will not replace AHK (or AI or any other scripting language) for their non-text-expansion functionality and thus should work together with them without fault; for some cheap text expanders, this is not always the case.

But it seems that PhraseExpander is the top offering in text expansion today. I will continue to do my text expansion with AHK for the time being, but I'm eager to buy this commercial whenever it becomes near perfect, and chances are it will.