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The problem comes when autocorrect is too aggressive and changes things that are already correct. Correcting, say, "inferoor" to "inferior" is useful on devices

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
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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.

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.