Antidote 11 and the Power of Deep Learning

Druide informatique is pleased to announce the release of Antidote 11, the 25th anniversary edition of its famous writing software. Among more than 100 new features, the corrector introduces a new neural engine and allows the creation of custom correction rules. Deep learning is used to pronounce all words in French and English, with two accents in each language. And poets, songwriters and advertisers can now draw on the creative power of a dictionary of rhymes and near-rhymes.

A refined interface, a neural engine and much more

A major improvement stands out: the corrector’s interface has been greatly refined. By reducing the secondary elements to a minimum, the main space is dedicated to the text, clean and simplified. Beneath this lighter exterior beats a new heart: a neural correction engine, the result of a partnership with the team of Professor Yoshua Bengio, launching Antidote into the world of deep learning. This new engine already provides new diagnostics, such as the insertion of missing words and commas, and it will form a major basis of Antidote’s future development.

For the first time, custom rules can shape corrections according to specific needs, for example to watch over delicate or important words or phrases. Another much requested customization: option presets can be saved and recalled to adapt diagnostics to different writing targets. New stylistic detections help polish the texts, flushing out dangling prepositions. New tooltips provide access to synonyms to help avoid repetition and offer intelligent rephrasing for certain style detections: one click is enough to modify a sentence.

Richer dictionaries, with pronunciations, rhymes and more

The dictionaries are also making great strides, including the addition of 5000 words such as smishing and cleantech. How do you say gewurztraminer? Antidote can pronounce over 500,000 word forms, with a Toronto or London accent, recreating human voices through deep learning. Should one write replace with or replace by? One click reveals all possible prepositions directly among the definitions: more than 20,000 examples have been added to illustrate usage. The new dictionary of rhymes takes English prosody into account, distinguishing in particular between perfect and imperfect rhymes.

Equivalent progress in French

The French corrector benefits from the same improvements as in English, with its own neural engine and the intelligent replacement of style elements such as adverb repetition and redundant conjunctions. Over 3000 new words make their debut, such as écoanxiété and vaccinodrome. All word forms are pronounced with Montréal and Paris accents, and 5000 combinations, 20,000 examples and 30,000 synonyms have been added. The dictionary of rhymes takes the search for similar tones a step further, offering multi-word rhymes and clever near-rhymes. More than 100,000 new translations will help those who use both languages.

A breath of fresh air throughout the Antidote array

The cloud edition, Antidote Web, inherits these new features, and Antidote Mobile, the edition for iOS, benefits from improvements to the dictionaries and guides, including pronunciations. For the first time, subscribers to an Antidote+ plan can benefit from the progress of a new edition free of charge, on all their screens: their Client Portal invites them to download Antidote 11 for Windows and Mac; Antidote Web is upgraded as of today; and the App Store will update Antidote Mobile. Owners of a previous edition can upgrade it with a discount at www.antidote.info.

Druide informatique produces and markets Antidote, the most comprehensive writing assistance software suite available for English and French, as well as Typing Pal, the renowned typing tutorial application. The company is also the creator of WebElixir, a quality assurance service for websites, while its subsidiary, Éditions Druide, specializes in the publication of French-language literature and reference works.