Given that spellcheckers are mostly stable tech, I wonder why Google’s spellchecker in Gmail, or even in Chrome in “enhanced” mode, is so bad.

Even Microsoft Word, being a local app and everything, manages to work better than Google’s cloud-based offerings. That’s surely evidence that progress is far from being linear.

There have been some very specific issues I and others have noticed that lead me to believe the backend for Google’s cloud based spellchecker has changed from a traditional language model to some more generalized LLM-based system. It’s gotten distinctly more terrible a couple of times in the last few years.