Project · open source
Plume
A writing assistant for Windows. As you type, in any application, Plume suggests the most likely words and can read your text aloud, in French and English.
Free · Windows 10 or 11 · no administrator rights · or the portable version (zip, no installation)
What Plume does
Word prediction
In a word processor, a browser or an email: Plume suggests the most likely words, and a single number key picks one.
The next word
After a space, Plume suggests what comes next: “I don't” → know, think; “thank” → you.
Spelling and accents
Accents are optional (“ecol” → école) and a misspelled word is found by its sound (“becuas” → because).
Reading aloud
The word under the mouse, the chosen word, each finished sentence or the selected text, with the Windows voices.
It learns from you
Your words, your phrasing, your abbreviations (“btw” → by the way). They stay on the computer; nothing is recorded in password fields or terminals, and one button erases everything.
Bilingual and accessible
Writing and interface in French or English. Light, dark, cream or high-contrast themes, and any font, for instance one designed for dyslexia.
Install
- Download PlumeSetup-1.0.1.exe.
- Run it, then click Install. Plume installs for your account, without administrator rights, and appears in the Start menu.
- Start writing: Plume's toolbar appears and suggested words show up below the cursor.
The program is not digitally signed: if Windows shows “Windows protected your PC”, choose More info then Run anyway. Plume is uninstalled from Settings → Apps → Installed apps. The SHA-256 checksums of the files are on the releases page.
Keyboard
| 1 … 9 | choose a suggested word (or F1 … F9, or the mouse) |
| Esc | hide the list, for instance to type a digit |
| Ctrl+Shift+F12 | read the selection or the last sentence |
| Ctrl+Shift+F11 | turn word prediction on or off |
Under the hood
The engine combines a trigram language model, interpolated with bigrams and word frequencies. It is estimated on the 2023 news of the Leipzig Corpora Collection and the Tatoeba example sentences (1.7 million sentences in French, 3 million in English), and on OpenSubtitles subtitle frequencies; the vocabulary holds 80,000 forms in French and 70,000 in English. Misspellings are caught by a phonetic key and an edit distance computed on the beginning of the word. What you write is added to the model, and a prediction takes less than a millisecond.
Plume is written in C# and builds with the compiler that ships with Windows, without any dependency. It is inspired by Quillsoft's WordQ, but it is an independent project. It still lacks voice dictation, word usage examples and highlighting while reading.
Licenses
The code is under the MIT license. The dictionaries are under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license: they are derived from FrequencyWords (OpenSubtitles), Tatoeba and the Leipzig Corpora Collection. The full user guide is in the README.