The autofill engine is what Dashlane uses to analyse the content and identify the different types of fields on the web pages you visit. It will allow Dashlane to offer the most relevant information for autofill and offer contextual help when you create an online account or change a password for example.
In this article, we'll explain the difference between our current engine and the new one we'll release soon which is powered by machine learning. We'll also explain how to switch from one engine to the other and how to share feedback directly with the team who built the new engine.
Contents
More info on autofill engines
Our current autofill engine, the Semantic Rule Engine, is based on a set of rules implemented by our engineers to identify fields on web pages. This means that if a website doesn’t match those human-set rules, the fields may not be recognized properly. Therefore, it requires heavy maintenance work and has an impact on your computer's performance.
With the new engine powered by machine learning, we no longer have a set of rules. Instead, we "fed" the engine with a large amount of websites that we classified manually and the engine used those examples to learn how to recognize fields on its own. As a result, this new engine is more efficient to identify fields in different contexts.
The main advantages of this new engine are:
- Improved accuracy.
- Faster adaptation. The engine powered by machine learning can better adjust to web standards changes.
- Lower maintenance cost. That means more resources available to build upon instead of maintaining.
- Faster and lighter. It has less impact on your computer's performance.
How to enable/disable the machine learning engine
As soon as the feature was enabled for you on our end, you can switch from one engine to the other through the extension options page. This page can be accessed the following way:
- In Chrome or Chromium: right click the Dashlane extension in your browser's toolbar and select Options
- In Firefox: right click the Dashlane extension in your browser's toolbar, select Manage Extension and on the page that opens then click the three dots at the top right of the extension info and select Options.
Once you're on the options page, you can select either the Machine Learning Engine (Beta) or the usual Semantic Rule Engine and then click Save Changes. Note that the choice will be there only if the feature was enabled on our end first and if your extension is in Standalone mode (web app).
Enabling the new engine will prompt you for an additional permission in your browser. This is only temporary. The latest versions of the engine that we are currently fine-tuning do not require this permission anymore.
You can come back to this page and switch back whenever you want, if you wish to.
How to share feedback
We set up a dedicated email address that you can use to send feedback: ml-beta@dashlane.com.
We highly recommend using this address if the feedback you'd like to send should be read by our development team. However please note that you will not necessarily get a reply from us on this channel.
On the other hand, if you need support with autofill in general or anything else, please use the button at the bottom of this page to contact our Support team. Note that this channel is not monitored by our development team and, even though you can expect a reply for sure, it could take a few days before we can read your message. Indeed, we are currently facing a high volume of support requests which prevents us from replying as quickly as wish to.
Thank you in advance for your help and for your understanding!