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I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respec

I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant. As a thought experiment, consider voice input. Voice input is often used when a screen isn't even available for feedback, so the computer has to figure out if it thinks it transcribed you correctly. To make the usability bearable (and to keep the computational difficulty down), contemporary systems don't ask you for clarification; they just try to transcribe your sentence against a dictionary. For the voice-controlled systems of today, "autocorrect" is definitely part of the input mechanism.

dizzystar 9y ago
On Android, there is a top strip of suggested words that you can tap (seems to be one on iPhone?). It's pretty decent, and is definitely a part of how I type, which is basically, type 2 to 3 letters, tap the word I want. I can write some lengthy emails quickly using this style of typing, and I really don't use autocorrect that much. Touch-screen typing is an entirely different interface than a physical keyboard.
antoineMoPa 9y ago
I somewhat agree with this compensation logic, however, I think the correction is not intelligent enough to be bearable yet (Not context-aware, no grammar support, poor support across languages, etc.). I type my stuff faster without autocorrect. Also, the post is about a macbook, which has a keyboard.
- niftich 9y ago
  Yes, the TFA is about a laptop from a maker who popularized autocorrect on smartphones. In the early days, spellcheck was an application-level concern, but its presence in smartphone platforms as an OS-level service made them part of user and developer expectations. Nowadays, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS all come with built-in spellcheck, with various levels of default autocorrect.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant. That's a nice theory; the problem is that autocorrect is often stunningly bad at that, and turns slight typos into radically different words. Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements. Voice control is, obviously, a whole different kettle of fish since you don't have a text input stream to start with.
- JoshTriplett 9y ago
  > Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements. That assumes that you leave the typos in place rather than fixing them. If your goal is to type error-free text, then which one leads to the correct text faster? Autocorrect and then fixing the occasional word it gets wrong, or trying to edit away typos on a tiny screen?
  - mkl 9y ago
    The problem is you have to notice the autocorrect error quickly to be sure of that working. When you miss one and notice it later, you may have forgotten what word you intended. It's also more of a problem when you don't notice it, as it may change your meaning or render it incomprehensible to a message recipient. I notice this kind of problem a lot with dictation, where it can completely transform the look of a word, and I sometimes have to say it out loud to try and figure out what I might have meant that sounds similar.
  - inimino 9y ago
    The goal is to communicate meaning. If you don't have an army of editors between you and your readers, it is unlikely that you'll achieve error-free text, and typos left in place is better at communicating meaning. Autocorrection is a lossy, information-destroying transformation.
njarboe 9y ago
At some point gesture typing got turned on on my android phone, found it by accident, and then tried it out. I really like it much better than tapping. Smooth circling gestures gets the word displayed and the row of three alternative mappings almost always has the word I want if its first guess was wrong. This was especially nice for me as my natural finger hits about 1/8 of an inch to the right of where I think it should. Is there any way to calibrate the touch position on android to fix this problem? Google fails me and, if this is not possible, it seems the tech industry has also. I have Android 8.0.0.
azernik 9y ago
That may be true, but the reported behavior is on desktop/laptop MacOS.
abecedarius 9y ago
What I think I'd like is to type a whole input and then go back and select corrections all in a batch. The correction mode could use more of the screen to help you go faster, plus take advantage of rightward context as well as leftward. Very probable corrections could take advantage of Fitts' law or maybe grouping of multiple corrections into one. The goal is to never get 'corrected' without my assent, while still going fast. This might be underexplored, because designers aim to keep it easy for everyone without training. (But this is also likely just a bad idea. I mostly just don't type on phones and curse them when I do.)
pishpash 9y ago
Autocorrect is okay for meaningless rants to your brogrammer. Autocorrect should be off for documents as a rule, unless you click a button to autocorrect everything, or turn it on specifically. Plus, you don't autocorrect words you don't understand that are long and big, there are metrics for measuring that.
stordoff 9y ago
The problem comes when autocorrect is too aggressive and changes things that are already correct. Correcting, say, "inferoor" to "inferior" is useful on devices where mistakes are commonplace. However, these are examples that I've notice my phone "correct" over the last few months, often changing the entire meaning or making it nonsensical: "if" or "is" to I; "ran" to "Ra"; "nan" to "Na"; "drew" to "are"; "near" to "new" I've also had a couple of occasions where trying to type a specific letter has resulted in the letter to either side (e.g. "o" or "p" when trying to type "i") and it's taken multiple tries to hit the right letter because the device thinks it knows better and has (presumably) made the touch target so tiny (and I know it's not a hardware/screen issue, because I've seen the keyboard display that you've hit a certain key then input something different)
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Houshalter 9y ago
  These sound more like bugs than a correctly functioning autocorrect. Apple's autocorrect has had some serious bugs like you mentioned, e.g. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5129957/Does-Apple-autocorrect-bug.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5129957/Does-... I don't know why people hate autocorrect so much. Yes it's annoying. But trying to use a mobile "keyboard" without it is far more annoying. For every word it gets wrong, it gets 10 more right. Maybe more. And saves me a ton of time on average. It should definitely be considered part of the input process. Certain kinds of mobile keyboads, like the swyping based ones, and the ones on tiny smart watches, would literally be unusable without autocorrect. If you know how they work, I think they are pretty elegant. Taking a probability distribution over all the letters you could have been aiming for and missed, and all the words you could have been trying to type, and the probability of each in that context.

dizzystar 9y ago

On Android, there is a top strip of suggested words that you can tap (seems to be one on iPhone?). It's pretty decent, and is definitely a part of how I type, which is basically, type 2 to 3 letters, tap the word I want. I can write some lengthy emails quickly using this style of typing, and I really don't use autocorrect that much. Touch-screen typing is an entirely different interface than a physical keyboard.

antoineMoPa 9y ago

I somewhat agree with this compensation logic, however, I think the correction is not intelligent enough to be bearable yet (Not context-aware, no grammar support, poor support across languages, etc.). I type my stuff faster without autocorrect. Also, the post is about a macbook, which has a keyboard.

niftich 9y ago
Yes, the TFA is about a laptop from a maker who popularized autocorrect on smartphones. In the early days, spellcheck was an application-level concern, but its presence in smartphone platforms as an OS-level service made them part of user and developer expectations. Nowadays, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS all come with built-in spellcheck, with various levels of default autocorrect.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant. That's a nice theory; the problem is that autocorrect is often stunningly bad at that, and turns slight typos into radically different words. Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements. Voice control is, obviously, a whole different kettle of fish since you don't have a text input stream to start with.

JoshTriplett 9y ago
> Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements. That assumes that you leave the typos in place rather than fixing them. If your goal is to type error-free text, then which one leads to the correct text faster? Autocorrect and then fixing the occasional word it gets wrong, or trying to edit away typos on a tiny screen?
- mkl 9y ago
  The problem is you have to notice the autocorrect error quickly to be sure of that working. When you miss one and notice it later, you may have forgotten what word you intended. It's also more of a problem when you don't notice it, as it may change your meaning or render it incomprehensible to a message recipient. I notice this kind of problem a lot with dictation, where it can completely transform the look of a word, and I sometimes have to say it out loud to try and figure out what I might have meant that sounds similar.
- inimino 9y ago
  The goal is to communicate meaning. If you don't have an army of editors between you and your readers, it is unlikely that you'll achieve error-free text, and typos left in place is better at communicating meaning. Autocorrection is a lossy, information-destroying transformation.

njarboe 9y ago

At some point gesture typing got turned on on my android phone, found it by accident, and then tried it out. I really like it much better than tapping. Smooth circling gestures gets the word displayed and the row of three alternative mappings almost always has the word I want if its first guess was wrong. This was especially nice for me as my natural finger hits about 1/8 of an inch to the right of where I think it should. Is there any way to calibrate the touch position on android to fix this problem? Google fails me and, if this is not possible, it seems the tech industry has also. I have Android 8.0.0.

azernik 9y ago

That may be true, but the reported behavior is on desktop/laptop MacOS.

abecedarius 9y ago

What I think I'd like is to type a whole input and then go back and select corrections all in a batch. The correction mode could use more of the screen to help you go faster, plus take advantage of rightward context as well as leftward. Very probable corrections could take advantage of Fitts' law or maybe grouping of multiple corrections into one. The goal is to never get 'corrected' without my assent, while still going fast. This might be underexplored, because designers aim to keep it easy for everyone without training. (But this is also likely just a bad idea. I mostly just don't type on phones and curse them when I do.)

pishpash 9y ago

Autocorrect is okay for meaningless rants to your brogrammer. Autocorrect should be off for documents as a rule, unless you click a button to autocorrect everything, or turn it on specifically. Plus, you don't autocorrect words you don't understand that are long and big, there are metrics for measuring that.

stordoff 9y ago

The problem comes when autocorrect is too aggressive and changes things that are already correct. Correcting, say, "inferoor" to "inferior" is useful on devices where mistakes are commonplace. However, these are examples that I've notice my phone "correct" over the last few months, often changing the entire meaning or making it nonsensical: "if" or "is" to I; "ran" to "Ra"; "nan" to "Na"; "drew" to "are"; "near" to "new" I've also had a couple of occasions where trying to type a specific letter has resulted in the letter to either side (e.g. "o" or "p" when trying to type "i") and it's taken multiple tries to hit the right letter because the device thinks it knows better and has (presumably) made the touch target so tiny (and I know it's not a hardware/screen issue, because I've seen the keyboard display that you've hit a certain key then input something different)

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Houshalter 9y ago
These sound more like bugs than a correctly functioning autocorrect. Apple's autocorrect has had some serious bugs like you mentioned, e.g. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5129957/Does-Apple-autocorrect-bug.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5129957/Does-... I don't know why people hate autocorrect so much. Yes it's annoying. But trying to use a mobile "keyboard" without it is far more annoying. For every word it gets wrong, it gets 10 more right. Maybe more. And saves me a ton of time on average. It should definitely be considered part of the input process. Certain kinds of mobile keyboads, like the swyping based ones, and the ones on tiny smart watches, would literally be unusable without autocorrect. If you know how they work, I think they are pretty elegant. Taking a probability distribution over all the letters you could have been aiming for and missed, and all the words you could have been trying to type, and the probability of each in that context.