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Things I'd Change About Auto-Correct
- OceanKing 7y agoRegarding the last point specifically, there is an established texting convention. Say you you (or autocorrect) have made a mistake and typed word A and you have already sent the message, but really you meant word B. Then, if you notice this mistake (granted, if), it is common convention to simply reply “*B”. Then, when the recipient reads to the mistaken word A and wonders why the word A seems out of place, they can look at the subsequent message and substitute B for A, without you even having to explicitly designate which word you made a mistake in (this is still sometimes necessary, but rarely).
- thomasahle 6y agoI haven't seen that convention used. Not that it's any bad. Personally I use /s/old/new which also had the benefit of some platforms, like slack, automatically fixing the original message.
- randallsquared 6y agoWait, what? I've used that, but I don't think I've ever seen Slack fix the original!
- thomasahle 6y agoYeah, it's not really documented, so I was quite surprised when it first happened. They talk about it here though: https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/505178492431269888 https://twitter.com/SlackHQ/status/505178492431269888
- lordgrenville 6y agoSlack has some surprising, hard to discover UI tricks. Another one I learned recently is you can make text into a hyperlink by copying a URL to your clipboard, highlighting the text in Slack, and pasting. https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1240387882507997186 https://twitter.com/ftrain/status/1240387882507997186
- mercer 6y agoHa, cool trick! Reminds me of the Trello trick where if you press the 'copy' keyboard shortcut while hovering over a card, it will copy a link to that specific card.
- mercer 6y agothat's an awesome trick. Thanks!
- michaelcampbell 6y agoRequires a leading /. Discord does this too, but without that requirement.
- StavrosK 6y agoI've seen *correction used extensively among my non-technical peers, the sed syntax is more common across technical ones.
- Agentlien 6y agoMy friends and I have used this convention for IM apps since 2003. I haven't seen anyone do it for SMS, though.
- kohtatsu 6y agosed-style works in discord too without the leading / s/search/replace Bothers me that it won't trim a trailing / tho. FWIW it's usually faster just to press up (another shortcut to edit the last message) and word jump to fix. Also FWIW I've always seen the asterisk apended. “appended*”
- aaron695 6y agoWhy can't you edit sent messages? Why have we accepted this reality? That's what's truly bizarre.
- hoseja 6y agoBecause it brings more problems than solutions.
- aaron695 6y agoLike what? Slack can do it, what are they so special? I guess maybe in a fluent back and forward it might slow people a little worrying about things they shouldn't. But this is not my experience. This inability seems the IT industry at it's worse. It's like some Frankenstein putting immutability onto human beings.
- scbrg 6y ago> This inability seems the IT industry at it's worse. It's like some Frankenstein putting immutability onto human beings. I don't understand. Communication has historically not been possible to "edit". There's nothing inhuman about that. If I say something, I've said it. Of course I can later make a correction, but the words I said remain said. The same has been true for the thousands of years we've had written communication, until a few years ago (on some platforms). Personally, I find editing messages a misfeature. There's few things more annoying than replying to a message, and then finding out that the message you're replying to has been replaced by another one. If a platform has this feature, it makes me less likely to use it.
- mercer 6y agoWhile I do agree, I find that marking a message as 'edited' (like Telegram does) makes it less of a problem for me. Bonus points if I can click to see the original message!
- aaron695 6y agoNo, we have always been able to edit communication until the internet, because conversations/everything has always been unrecorded or very hard to access the archives of. Have you never had an argument get to 'you said this', 'no I did not' ? We even edit our own messaging in our heads. We make mistakes, why can't we correct them? (We are talking autocomplete of spelling and grammar here at the original level) And since obviously your end can have a setting/hack/default to keep the original anyway I'm not sure what the fear is.
- bagacrap 6y agoI see and use "B" as a correction instead of "B". It's very annoying when I'm correcting autocorrect, ie B automatically changed to A, because then in the follow up message it usually changes it again, so I end up with A*.
- OceanKing 6y agoThat’s why you put the asterisk first - that way, autocorrect doesn’t correct the word after it (at least for me)
- m463 7y agoI have turned it off and lived with it. The problem is the cross-over between spell checking and finger location. if I mistype something because my finger comes down on an adjacent key, with autocorrect turned off, I can figure it out. Say I want to type QWER and type FDSA by mistake, tomorrow when I read what I typed, figure out where my fingers were and recreate QWER. But with autocorrect which does spell checking and semantic stuff, there's a good chance that FDSA will be corrected to something like FORD or VISA and I will never be able to recreate what I was thinking of. I'm sorry I don't have a less contrived example. The reason I did this was because I had some important things I jotted down quickly, and later - even with an hour of thinking - I could not recreate my original thought. also... I do end up with n instead of space all the time. stuff like thenquicknbrownnfox happens often.
- basch 6y agoAbsolutely. iOS and android, and the microsoft swiftkey on android, I have an N problem. Comeone adaptive space detection!
- renewiltord 7y agoI have both an Android phone and an iPad. Google's autocorrect is far superior. The comparison isn't even close. Handles a lot of these cases: * Accidental last row instead of space - handled * Easy undo - first backspace hit returns to explicitly typed out text then next one backspaces * Whole word flashes on autocorrect * Current candidate for autocorrect is centered on screen above keyboard * Valid word won't autocorrect (can't actually test this since both devices are probably fully trained on what I type)
- goodcanadian 6y agoValid word won't autocorrect In my experience, my Android phone replaces valid words all the time to my great annoyance.
- Infinitesimus 6y agoWhat keyboard do you use? I've noticed this on Samsung's default keyboard as well and might switch to GBoard.
- goodcanadian 6y agoI hadn't previously thought about it, but it appears that Gboard is the default on my phone.
- nyhc99 6y agoI've had this problem quite a lot with both the default keyboard and with GBoard, although seemingly a little less frequently with GBoard. I also find that the speech-to-text often fails to grasp the contextual clues and blatantly uses the wrong "your" or the wrong "their."
- teaneedz 6y agoGBoard is as bad as all others and only marginally better in some situations. A couple of minutes ago I tweeted a post that included the word somehow. GBoard changed it to *someone. I went back and highlighted the word, changed it to somehow, verified it was corrected and submitted. In some fraction of Google's wisdom, it recorrected the word back to someone. Argh Autocorrect is a mess.
- WalterBright 7y agoI spend more time fixing autocorrect errors than my own errors. Turned it off. Don't miss it.
- _trampeltier 6y agoI even don't know somebody who use auto-correct. It's the first thing to turn off in every phone. I'm surprised to hear here from people who say they really use it.
- enriquto 6y agoThe first thing I do on a new input device is disable autocorrect for good. If you write regularly in three different languages, it's more a hindrance than a help.
- magicalhippo 6y agoSame, albeit just two languages. Also, in Norwegian we use compound words. So for example "garage door" is "garasjedør" ("garage" = "garasje"). The auto-correct on my Android hardly gets any of those right. I've noticed my friends who use auto-correct usually don't compound words, which can change the meaning of the sentence completely.
- StavrosK 6y agoSwiftKey generally does a good job with multiple languages, although it will sometimes replace an English word that I typed correctly with the Spanish word (which is spelled the same but has a stress mark) in an otherwise fully English sentence, with me unaware why it's making the distinción.
- Ndymium 6y agoI have two issues in Finnish with Android's (Gboard) autocorrect: inflection and language selection. In Finnish, words can have over a thousand inflected forms. Granted most of them are not used usually but every day I bump into a word that the autocorrect knows but when I add the inflection, it no longer recognises it. It tells me that it doesn't actually parse or "know" Finnish text, it just has a huge word list. The second issue is that it decides which language's suggestion to show based on the characters I've typed (since I have it set to both English and Finnish). Normally it shows suggestions from both languages but if I type a single ä, ö, or å, it never suggests an English word. This is unfortunate since I sometimes hit such a character by accident and I have to go back and retype the word from that point to get back the English suggestions.
- Agentlien 6y agoI use swiping on a Samsung phone and regularly write in three languages (English, Swedish, and Dutch). While there are some annoyances, I find it still speeds it up a lot as long as I change keyboard language (done by swiping left or right on the space bar) to match the language I'm currently using.
- loopz 6y agoTurn Auto-Correct off by default, and you're set. It's really insane how many places auto-correct sneaks itself in and replaces what you type as you type stuff correctly in the first place.
- tasogare 6y agoYep, on iPhone it’s more an hindrance than help especially when mixing languages, so I disable it as soon as I can. One thing I miss about Windows Phone keyboard was how good the prediction was. On iPhone it can predicts a useful word from time to time after months, but on WP I could type parts of long sentence without having to enter any new letter.
- Sharlin 6y agoAutosuggestions are useful. Being able to cycle between different autocompletions is useful. But autocorrection is worse than useless.
- carlob 6y agoI think a lot of this is context and language dependent: I've noticed on an android device I sometimes use instead of my main phone (which is dumb) that sometimes the autocorrect is really smarter than I thought. In Italian "c'è" means "there is", which is supercommon and also a pain to get right with apostrophe and diacritic, but "ce" is a valid pronoun: if you start typing by typing "ce" it will autocorrect to c'è, but if you go on typing "l'hai" ("ce l'hai" = "do you have it") it will autocorrect the "c'è" back to "ce".
- Agentlien 6y agoOn the other hand, I've recently had the opposite problem in Swedish. The autocorrect on my android treats å, ä, and ö not as proper letters but as a or o with diacritics. For many words with an o or a it seems to prefer words spelled the same but with å, ä, or ö in it. Even when I keep correcting it back again and again. For some common words it doesn't do it, but for most it does. One common and consistent example is mot (towards, against) which becomes möt (imperative form of meet)
- watwut 6y agoMine autocorrent insists on capitalizing words from single letters. It also regularly changes correct word into incorrect.
- hoseja 6y agoWhy does anyone let autocorrect actually change their words? Just let it suggest a correction and pick it, are people really this lazy?
- whitehouse3 6y agoBecause autocorrect is opt-out, not opt-in. The space key is used to confirm an autocorrection, on iPhone at least. To avoid it you need to explicitly tap the “verbatim” autocorrect choice. 9/10 times I don’t even notice autocorrect. It’s jarring when I need to go fix it.
- bluGill 6y agoIn many cases the default is auto correct will pick the word it thinks you want. Unless you turn it off there is no way to force a different word once it has made a choice. Depends on the keyboard of course, but there really isn't a good override by default.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIs this ignoring the elephant on the table? Why is it so frickin hard to type correctly on a phone?
- crazygringo 6y ago> 2) When an auto-capitalized correction is retyped by the user, don’t preserve capitalization Seriously, this isn't even a feature for anyone ever, it's a straight-up bug I seem to get hit with several times a day. But my absolute biggest problem with autocorrect isn't even on this list. It's when I swipe-type a word and the correct word comes out. Then I swipe-type a second word, and my iPhone decides the first word was wrong, and changes it to be more probable with the second word. Now, it's super-frustrating but wouldn't be the end of the world if I could just easily tap somewhere to restore the original first word. Occasionally it's listed as one of the options at the top of the keyboard, but not usually. Usually I've got to backspace through both entire words, retype the first word again, hit space twice so the iPhone "forgets" about being in double-word-correction mode, hit delete twice to delete the period-space, hit space again, and finally type my second word! It drives me nuts. I read what I'm typing as I type it. I don't ever want my phone to fix a word earlier. I wish so badly there were an option to disable this.
- huffmsa 6y ago#3 I fat finger the "Z" all the time when trying to hit a comma. Same with the space bar and bottom row. Should be easy to recognize.
- resters 6y agoI think Apple's autocorrect will be seen by historians as a very strange blind spot. I have a high end iPhone and autocorrect routinely slips in some corrections after I've already scanned the text visually and decided to press send. The corrections are usually not desired, and often replace valid sentences/words with guesses that are more common words, even at times words or abbreviations that I know I have texted years ago but never since. I'm not sure what's worse, the bad behavior of AutoCorrect or how laggy it is on my iPhone XS.
- Haga 6y agoThat idea about accidentally inserting advertising. I like that.
- acrooks 6y agoOnce my phone learns that I never intentionally write the word "ducking" I will be happy.
- jariel 6y agoFor #1, the author would be surprised at how many rare words there are out there that will collide with his corrections. It's a tough one, though the answer really relies upon setting a probabilistic threshold. The answer to many of these problems should lie with 'user settings' somewhere.
- makecheck 6y agoI had to just turn off most “correction” features because it was more frustrating to manually fix wrong autocompletes than to simply type in a continuous flow. And plenty of blame should be reserved for the keyboard design itself, causing mistakes. I literally started developing a new keyboard extension as a side project for no reason other than to move keys that constantly tripped me up. (Worst offenders are the stupidly-close backspace and action buttons so that half the time I send wrong text when I meant to delete a letter.)