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Autocorrect is fine for me in iOS 14. But Machine learning can also lead to regressions or edge cases. Here a fun rant about autocorrect in iOS 13: https://www

by ralfd 6y ago

Autocorrect is fine for me in iOS 14. But Machine learning can also lead to regressions or edge cases. Here a fun rant about autocorrect in iOS 13: https://www.smh.com.au/technology/iphone-autocorrect-driving-you-crazy-lately-you-re-not-alone-20191128-p53eus.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/iphone-autocorrect-driving... The good: > Machine learning has enabled the iPhone to correctly predict oddly spelt suburb names like Prahran and Woolloomooloo, to read the screen of an article and guess the surname or product I'm about to Google, and to suggest the spelling Bryan over Brian, because the former is a close friend. The ugly: > For at least two years now, my iPhone has insisted on autocorrecting Sydney to SYDNEY, every single time I type the word. After weeks of troubleshooting that included resetting the keyboard and uninstalling any transit apps I thought might be to blame, I realized the culprit. I have a few hundred contacts on my phone from a previous employer, all with UNSW SYDNEY as their address. What should happen here with a few _hundred_ entries of "SYDNEY"? I guess it should be unlearned after the user entered a few times (once? two times?) by hand "Sydney" and user entered text privileged over other text corpora (even dictionaries?). But then you have other problems again like autocorrect learning potentially wrong spelling idiosyncrasies of the user.

mschuster91 6y ago
> What should happen here with a few _hundred_ entries of "SYDNEY"? I'd say, change the case in the database to proper "Sydney" and have whatever writes a piece of physical mail do the transformation to the correct format?
lambda_obrien 6y ago
Because gboard predicts email addresses, and I have several Haskell-related mailing lists in my whitelist, gboard always tries to autocorrect "Haskell" to "haskell-mailing-list@..." when I am trying to text my pal about Haskell questions, so I get messages like (because I sometimes just swipe and send, without checking the message, like a moron): "Hey, do you know in haskell-mailing-list@something.org if the Prelude..." So, now I've turned off EVERY bit of AI bullshit everywhere, and I deal with mistakes myself.

by ralfd 6y ago

mschuster91 6y ago

> What should happen here with a few _hundred_ entries of "SYDNEY"? I'd say, change the case in the database to proper "Sydney" and have whatever writes a piece of physical mail do the transformation to the correct format?

lambda_obrien 6y ago

Because gboard predicts email addresses, and I have several Haskell-related mailing lists in my whitelist, gboard always tries to autocorrect "Haskell" to "haskell-mailing-list@..." when I am trying to text my pal about Haskell questions, so I get messages like (because I sometimes just swipe and send, without checking the message, like a moron): "Hey, do you know in haskell-mailing-list@something.org if the Prelude..." So, now I've turned off EVERY bit of AI bullshit everywhere, and I deal with mistakes myself.