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Why? I would imagine that better and better autocorrect will make us want it more and more, not less and less. I'm just interested in why you would drop it.

waivej 14y ago
I was stubborn and tried to like autocorrect for a long time. My partner laughed when I gave in because she turned it off within 20 minutes of getting her new phone. I found that autocorrect was intrusive and would interrupt my flow of words. The final straw was a few emails where I fought with it to get the word I wanted. I could have hit the X to cancel a change, but this required attention and it seemed hard to click in the right spot. It's easier to look for red underlines before I send an email.
saurik 14y ago
It has not been my experience that autocorrect has become better: it has simply become more lax. As an example, I would actually find it really useful if the iPhone's autocorrect was smart enough to realize that my fingers were slightly off position as I typed (due to the lack of physical feedback) and could figure out what word I meant to type. However, it seems to just be running a spell check; it doesn't even realize that if I mash at the screen four times I intend to have four letters and it should not autocorrect what I typed to a word with five letters because it seems to be spelled similarly. The result is that a slight offset on the keyboard doesn't get corrected: it gets mutated into something hilariously unrelated to what you intended to type. Meanwhile, it also doesn't bother trying to come up with any kind of confidence rating for words I type that it doesn't understand. As an example: if I sit there and type a word with one finger, carefully moving my hand slowly to each key and carefully lining up each press, when I hit space bar the iPhone should realize "there is no way in hell I should be correcting this right now: this was a careful and deliberate action on behalf of this user", and yet even when you do that it will take a word and butcher it into one of the words in its dictionary; which, in the case of the iPhone, includes such words as "it's" and excludes such words as "its"... it doesn't even have the common decency to run a grammar check, something Word has had a reasonable-if-not-perfect implementation of for well over a decade now. Honestly: the iPhone has a /lot/ to learn from Word.

waivej 14y ago

I was stubborn and tried to like autocorrect for a long time. My partner laughed when I gave in because she turned it off within 20 minutes of getting her new phone. I found that autocorrect was intrusive and would interrupt my flow of words. The final straw was a few emails where I fought with it to get the word I wanted. I could have hit the X to cancel a change, but this required attention and it seemed hard to click in the right spot. It's easier to look for red underlines before I send an email.

saurik 14y ago

It has not been my experience that autocorrect has become better: it has simply become more lax. As an example, I would actually find it really useful if the iPhone's autocorrect was smart enough to realize that my fingers were slightly off position as I typed (due to the lack of physical feedback) and could figure out what word I meant to type. However, it seems to just be running a spell check; it doesn't even realize that if I mash at the screen four times I intend to have four letters and it should not autocorrect what I typed to a word with five letters because it seems to be spelled similarly. The result is that a slight offset on the keyboard doesn't get corrected: it gets mutated into something hilariously unrelated to what you intended to type. Meanwhile, it also doesn't bother trying to come up with any kind of confidence rating for words I type that it doesn't understand. As an example: if I sit there and type a word with one finger, carefully moving my hand slowly to each key and carefully lining up each press, when I hit space bar the iPhone should realize "there is no way in hell I should be correcting this right now: this was a careful and deliberate action on behalf of this user", and yet even when you do that it will take a word and butcher it into one of the words in its dictionary; which, in the case of the iPhone, includes such words as "it's" and excludes such words as "its"... it doesn't even have the common decency to run a grammar check, something Word has had a reasonable-if-not-perfect implementation of for well over a decade now. Honestly: the iPhone has a /lot/ to learn from Word.