Lots of discussion about compute-intensive alternative solutions there, but what about a human layer where something triggers a "wow, this word is rare, let's call up Prof Whoever and ask them for a suggestion" notification? There's a lot of words in the world, sure, but you only need to solve each one so many times. Dictionaries seemed to manage this trick even before computers!

Similarly, I would pay a lot of money for a Spotify or Netflix alternative where a knowledgeable human looked at my activity every month or so and created a hand-tailored recommendation list, since those products seem pretty bad at nuance in ways that even just simple "do you like this for reason A or reason B" questions would answer.

I know how the sausage is made at some non-Google places, and there's a common institutional blind-spot where the algorithms people don't want any human-driven chocolate getting in their peanut butter, and lazy product people are perfectly content to let any junk the algorithm throws up be the math guys' fault. Sadly, the world is full of edge cases, and sometimes you need one-off rules. (There's a parallel thread going below where people are aggressively defending the fact that the translate product as implemented is bad at certain use cases. Baffling. At the end of the day, are you happier telling users they're doing it wrong than given them what they want?)