Innovating for a Better Dashlane: Autofill Now Powered by Machine Learning

If you’ve ever wondered how Dashlane knows how to populate form fields on a page, that’s all thanks to our autofill engine, also called a semantic engine. The engine reads a page, categorizes each form field, and will suggest what info to autofill once you click into the field.  

Over the past several months, we’ve been hard at work developing a new Machine Learning Engine to power our autofill. Think of it like your super-smart digital assistant—and we’re excited to introduce it to you. 

What’s different 

Our old semantic engine operated from rules set manually by our engineers. While this was effective on many sites, it wasn’t always efficient or reliable across all sites. That’s because a rule-based engine—which is what many other password managers use—is only capable of being reliably accurate on the most visited websites, leaving most web pages to be categorized only somewhat accurately. 

Our new autofill engine, on the other hand, can reliably and accurately categorize form fields on the vast majority of websites. The new engine relies on a specific branch of artificial intelligence (AI) called machine learning. This autofill continually learns how to read and categorize a page from a website dataset that will be continually added to over time. 

What this means for you 

Aside from the technical specifics, what does this actually mean for you? It’s simple. Your new autofill is:  

• Faster than ever: With the new Machine Learning Engine, the Dashlane icon appears in form fields twice as fast as before. On average, it now only takes 15 milliseconds for our engine to read and categorize a web page. That’s faster than the blink of an eye—seven times faster.  

• More accurate with every form field: On average, users with the new engine autofill 7.6% more forms. The more people interact with the engine, the smarter it will get. Plus, we are already in the process of developing a future version of this engine that will begin to recognize patterns and learn new behaviors, automatically.  

The way you use Dashlane isn’t changing—the experience is just getting better and faster.  

How do I get the new autofill?  

We’ve already rolled out the Machine Learning Engine to all customers and it’s now our default autofill engine for everyone. For more information about using the engine, see this article.

If you’re an admin on a Business or Team plan, you have already been switched over to the new engine. You can quickly and easily ensure that your internal sites are compatible by following these simple instructions. If you encounter an external website that no longer appears compatible with Dashlane, just let us know by emailing us at  ml-beta@​dashlane.​com.