There’s been quite a bit of talk on twitter today about Google Scribe. At first I tried it and didn’t really see the point as I’m able to type quicker than the suggestions appeared. However, then I tried just typing a phrase and accepting the first suggestion given at each point. I began with “university challenge” and the result was:

university challenged by their fierce ambitions, their friends and family togetherness and then they will become more apparent from the following detailed description of these properties are not well understood and therefore not available for this item is available online at the comfort of your home close to your family and friends together for another year of amazing pictures online featuring the world famous Concise Oxford English Dictionary and Thesaurus for Blind and Visually Impaired Children Committee, therefore, that there is anything you would not believe

Now, of course this is complete gibberish to humans. But I can see one potential application of this: spam creation. Spam filters are getting good at filtering out text that is complete rubbish. But using google scribe type technologies, spammers could easily create lots of unique blocks of text which would appear to any spam filter to be well spelt and grammatically correct English. I wonder how well gmail’s spam filters deal with this.