Autosuggest

AutoSuggest can take an incorrect 3 word address and suggest a list of valid 3 word addresses. It has powerful features that can, for example, optionally limit results to a country or area, and prioritise results that are near the user (see Clipping and focus, below).

Autosuggest provides corrections for the following types of input error:

• Typing errors
• Spelling errors
• Mistaken words (e.g. singular vs. plural)
• Words in the wrong order

Input 3 word address

AutoSuggest accepts either a full or partial 3 word address (it will be partial if the user is still typing in a search box, for example). A partial 3 word address must contain at least the first two words and first character of the third word. For example filled.count.s will return results, but anything shorter will not.

Clipping and focus

Clipping allows you to specify a country (or list of countries) and/or geographic area to exclude results that are not likely to be relevant to your users. To give a more targeted, shorter set of results to your users, we recommend you use the clipping parameters. If you know your user’s current location, we recommend that you use the focus to return results that are likely to be more relevant (i.e. results near the user).

In summary, the clipping policy is used to optionally restrict the list of candidate AutoSuggest results, after which, if focus has been supplied, this will be used to weight the results in order of relevance to the focus.

Multiple clipping policies can be specified, though only one of each type. For example you can clip to country and clip to circle in the same AutoSuggest call, and it will clip to the intersection of the two (results must be in the circle AND in the country). However, you can't specify two clip-to-circle policies in the same call.

Language

AutoSuggest will search in all languages. However, you can additionally specify a fallback language, to help the API in situations where the input is unclear. For normal text input, the language parameter is optional, and AutoSuggest will work even without a language parameter. However, for voice input the language should always be specified.

Results

As well as Nuance-based speech recognition systems, AutoSuggest also supports a Generic Voice option. This supports output from any speech recognition software. This input type handles spaces between words, for example, 'filled count soap'. Users should not pronounce 'dot' when speaking a 3 word address, and this input type not handle text in languages in which words are not separated by spaces, e.g. Chinese. Language detection should be disabled, so language must always be set.

Resource URL

https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest

Parameters

Example requests

Autosuggest

This example returns AutoSuggest results for the partial 3 word address film.crunchy.spiri ; the results are not clipped and not ranked for proximity to a given location.

GET https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest?input=film.crunchy.spiri&key=[YOUR-API-KEY]

Autosuggest with focus only

This example returns AutoSuggest results for the partial 3 word address film.crunchy.spiri ; the results are ranked for proximity relevance to the focus point of 50.842404,4.361177.

GET https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest?input=film.crunchy.spiri&focus=50.842404,4.361177&key=[YOUR-API-KEY]

Autosuggest with clip-to-circle

This example searches for plan.clips.a; the results are constrained to those that are within 10 km of the point 51.4243877,-0.3474524.

GET https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest?input=plan.clips.a&clip-to-circle=51.4243877,-0.3474524,10&key=[YOUR-API-KEY]

AutoSuggest with focus and clip-to-country

GET https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest?input=plan.clips.a&focus=51.4243877,-0.3474524&clip-to-country=GB&key=[YOUR-API-KEY]

AutoSuggest with clip-to-bounding-box

This searches for plans.clip.a in the bounding box described by a NE corner of 54,2 and a SW corner of 50,-4.

GET https://what3words.search.hereapi.com/v3/autosuggest?input=plan.clips.a&clip-to-bounding-box=50,-4,54,2&key=[YOUR-API-KEY]

JSON

{
  "suggestions": [
      {
          "country": "BE",
          "nearestPlace": "Brussels, Brussels Capital",
          "words": "film.crunchy.spirits",
          "distanceToFocusKm": 1,
          "rank": 1,
          "language": "en"
      },
      {
          "country": "ES",
          "nearestPlace": "Caldes de Montbui, Catalonia",
          "words": "film.crunchy.spirit",
          "distanceToFocusKm": 1039,
          "rank": 2,
          "language": "en"
      },
      {
          "country": "NL",
          "nearestPlace": "Weert, Limburg",
          "words": "firm.crunchy.spires",
          "distanceToFocusKm": 105,
          "rank": 3,
          "language": "en"
      }
  ]
}