Gboard's Rambler Rewrites Your Intent

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When I go for dog walks, I like to voice dictate raw thoughts into Obsidian to collect fodder for my writing. They will be scattered and possibly incoherent, but they are enough for me to remember my intent later on. Eventually I will sit down and clean them all up. When I communicate with another person, be that over text or in an article, I want to be thoughtful about what I am saying.

Just like when I had accidentally opted out of smart notifications, I missed Google's announcement in May about Rambler. The feature is designed to help clean up speech by removing repetition and filler words. I wanted to see if it could more accurately transcribe my quick brain dumps.

I ended a paragraph in my notes with "Provide citations." I spoke a complete sentence with no repetition or filler words, but Rambler still decided to change the tone:

Please provide citations for this information.

Even more humorously, in a second attempt the text was rewritten to:

(Smith, 2023)

I said "Calculate and mention how long I've been running GrapheneOS" and Rambler completely made up a duration of time:

I've been running GrapheneOS for about two years now.

It rewrote "Expand on the lack of a live preview to help you catch it" to have an entire argument I never stated:

This is especially risky because the lack of a live preview means you cannot catch errors in real-time, forcing you to rely entirely on the tool's initial output without verification.

All three of those were notes to myself, but Rambler decided to act on them as commands. The quotes are egregious examples of Rambler misunderstanding my intent and are easy to spot. Things get harder when the changes are subtler. With a non-language model based tool, the blast radius is relatively small. Just like how a spell checker only changes a single word. In a language model based tool, that's not the case.

The problem is Rambler doesn't just attempt to correct spelling mistakes. The support page says you can make requests like "make this sound more professional" and Rambler will do what it decides is best. If you have existing text before you start dictation, it may even rewrite that. Rambler is running your raw transcription and past text through a language model with a system prompt you cannot inspect. You do not get a chance to catch any mistakes with a preview or comparison.

You can easily write messages with unclear intent on your own without AI.Google specifically designed the tool to help with language barriers where this problem comes up often. I think that is a meaningful use case to address. However, there is a difference between improving clarity and changing what you are saying.

This is part of a much larger issue with language model based tools reinterpreting you. It's the continued slopification of everything you use. When you write messages with Rambler you are not just asking for help with clarity, you are giving up agency in how you communicate. Google tells us:

As Android transitions from an operating system into an intelligence system, your devices are becoming even more helpful with upgrades that will save you time.

I don't know if anyone asked for Android to become an "intelligence system."

An alternative that I have been using for a while is FUTO keyboard's voice typing. You can select a larger model like English-244 to improve accuracy. I just need to slow down my speech a bit when ranting notes into my phone on walks.

1. I once did Toastmasters and they would have a person count all the filler words used during presentations. That really made me notice how many we use when speaking.
2. A headphone mic and wind do not make for great audio reception.
3. Who is Smith and what knowledge do they hold?
4. The actual answer is 14 months now since I first installed!