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 the vast majority of web pages to be categorized only somewhat accurately.
Our new autofill engine, on the other hand, can reliably and accurately categorize form fields on 92% 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. If you want to learn even more about the technicalities, head here.
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 in an instant. On average, it 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: The more people interact with autofill, 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?
Over the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out the Machine Learning Engine until it’s our default autofill engine for all our customers. Beta testers already have access to the new engine and should follow instructions for enabling the new autofill here.
Interested in signing up for our beta program? Beta testers get first access to our latest and greatest features and have the chance to give us feedback on how we can improve. Sign up here.
