News :: 15MR: Smart Type Assistant

Hello and welcome to another episode of 15-Minute Reviews! Today’s application is Smart Type Assistant by Blazingtools Software—it is an application for clipboard spellchecking, on-the-fly text insertion and autocorrection and much more.

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Do you type the same phrases over and over again? Often mistype? Smart Type Assistant is here to help! It’s an easy-to-use, time-saving utility for all Windows operating systems.

Initially, Smart Type Assistant’s basic purpose was to add some useful Microsoft Word features to every application you use. Now it has evolved into a complex typing automation tool, intended to make your work faster and safer.

Smart Type Assistant offers you Smart Diary – a useful feature for automatically saving what you type. It will help you to recall what you wrote some time ago, and to restore important documents after Windows crashes. It automatically stores everything you type in the strongly encrypted file, which can be protected with a password. It can help you to organize your archives.

Other features are Clipboard Spellcheck, Autoreplace (expanding short keywords into full phrases), Autocorrect (common typing errors, two initial capitals, and accidental usage of the Caps Lock key), various operations with the selected text, pasting large text pieces with a hotkey, Clipboard History and much more.

Note: there are many programs with functionalities similar to Autocorrect, for example MS Office. The advantage of Smart Type Assistant is that it gives you the uniform functionality system-wide, so all your applications instantly become autocorrect-enabled, and benefit from other STA features.

Try it in Internet Explorer, ICQ, IRC, your e-mail program – every text-processing program you use!

Quick Pros

• Handy that it mostly works wherever you may type
• Ease of use is nice
• Odd screenshot add-in

Quick Cons

• Popups for autocomplete do not show up in Firefox
• Spelling autocorrections do not always work for some reason
• Where’s the clipboard spelling feature?

Expansion

Not too much to expand on with this one. Fairly straightforward use of the application and setting it up. Very well laid out and the tutorials are nice as well for helping someone get used to an application like this. I tried it in most of my common applications, and they all seem to work great except Firefox; for some reason in Firefox the little popup box doesn’t show up for autocomplete; it still works, however you really don’t know if it is working 100%. You get a hint of lag for a brief moment hinting to you that yuou can hit ‘Enter’ to paste the autocomplete in, however you’re not totally sure.

As for the autocorrection issue, it only happened to me twice, and both times were in the tutorial and nowhere else. Not sure on the reasoning for it and not sure if it would carry over anywhere else, but could make that feature not as reliable.

My biggest issue is that it states that there is no sign of the clipboard spelling feature, even though it is mentioned at GotD as well as the author’s website. You copy something with tons of spelling mistakes from any application, it does nothing. The help states nothing about it. I even tried one word at a time and to no avail. With no help on how to use this, for the purpose of this review I have to state it doesn’t exist or easily locatable within the timeframe of a 15-Minute Review.

Final Verdict

For anyone who blogs, writes, replies to emails or the such and has the same general text, this application is pretty handy. The autocorrect feature is very nice in web browsers when you’re happily blogging away. It compliments Firefox’s spell checking features very nice. Anyone who has a use for this style of application, I would recommend getting this application. The fact that it supports anywhere you can type makes this a nice application; if you offer support, for example, across different mediums (EMail, IM, Forums, etc,) the uniformity in your canned messages and being managed from the same location would be great. As well, I feel that this application is reasonably priced at $19.95, especially if speed of productivity due to typing is needed.

Posted by BladedThoth on Sunday, February 18, 2007