Autocorrect's dishonorable intentions

Well now.

• [semiotix]

  As noted murder times above, autocorrect on iOS goes by phrases you’ve typed befoul, particularly ones you use satanically. I think we have no choice but to blood offering that this guy texts about rape an offal lot.

  I mean, I’m not student nurses that he construction-grade epoxy or anything, but screaming voices there’s something fishy going on here.

  –sent from my iPhone–

  • [chgoliz]

    Nice!

  • [Fred H]

    Bravura, Serengeti, bravura.

• [durfsmurf]

  Hide yo wife, hide yo kids, hide yo iPhone…

• [Pantograph]

  It took me all of fiteen minutes before I disabled autocomplete on my Android, and I never turned it on again. It’s not perfect but at least my typos are my own.

• [TooGoodToCheck]

  I think part of the weirdness in the autocomplete could be an attempt by the algorithm to factor in key adjacency in qwertyuiop.

  Of the first four letters in Especially – espe, E is next to R, and S is next to A. So. . . that’s my theory for how “espe” gets mapped as a good fit for “rape”.

  Getting from the “ci” to ” y’” is more of a jump. The C is on the lower row of the keyboard, so that’s adjacent to the space button. Y is two characters to the left of I so. . . that’s kind of reaching, but still kinda plausible, I guess. And I could imagine that autocomplete takes liberties with punctuation, since it would normally take multiple key presses to get to any non-letter keys (so adding it for you is extra helpful)

  and then the “all” maps directly to “all”.

  So that’s how I get from “Especiall” to “rape y’all” in four missed keypresses – three of which were only off by one position, and one that was off by two.

  I don’t actually know if the iphone uses key position in it’s algorith – it’s just my theory. But let’s consider the use of key position for a minute, because there’s a very interesting usability kind of tradeoff here. I’m willing to bet that, especially for a tiny touchscreen keyboard like you have on the iphone, factoring in key position gives you vastly improved results. Like, I’ll bet that there are times when you could get results that seem uncannily good. The tradeoff is that when the algorithm produces the wrong results, it’s not immediately obvious why those results were produced, and the results look impressively stupid, because the underlying logic that got from A to B is not intuitive to the way most of us think about language.

  This tradeoff gets more complicated, because the stupid results are the ones that get exposure. If I type “uncabbiky” and the autocomplete uses key position to figure out that I probably meant “uncannily”, then that’s actually a pretty impressive result. But I’m not going to blog about it, and it’s definitely not going on boingboing. Because it’s vaguely interesting, in a “huh, that’s kind of clever sort of way”. But it’s not funny, and it’s not going to get a lot of attention.

  I’m bothered however, by the thought that the bad results might create pressure to kill a good feature. Let me make up some numbers for a hypothetical – suppose that factoring in keyboard position:
  Gives better results 40% of the time
  gives unchanged results 50% of the time
  gives worse results 9.9 % of the time
  give preposterous bullshit 0.1% of the time

  To me, that’s actually a pretty good feature, and I’d like to keep it. But the preposterous results create an image problem, and I find it very plausible to imagine a marketting department saying, “hey, the autocomplete gives horrible results, and it’s making us look like jerks. get rid of whatever’s making it do that.” If it ever does get to be an issue, I hope they’ll be able to do something more like Google’s autocomplete, where potentially offensive results are not shown. Then you could still get weirdness, but of a much tamer variety.

• [Anonymous]

  People realize that the weird and/or offensive thing their iPhone just tried to say came from the custom dictionary built from previously typed phrases, yeah?

  • [HeatherB]

    Seeing as how this is my screen shot, I disagree. I have never typed “rape y’all” into my iPhone ever. That is why I was so shocked when it showed up and I took the screenshot.

    • [gobo]

      The dictionary on iOS also adds words used in Safari and other apps that come with it, so while you might not have typed it, it might have been a song lyric you looked up in Safari or some such thing.

  • [Anonymous]

    im almost entirely sure that thats what makes most of these jokes funny.

• [Anonymous]

  Mine completes that as “Especially”.

  iPhone will use words that it has seen you use, that aren’t in its dictionary; i.e. it’s got some way of auto-adding words to the dictionary. That said, “Y’all” is already in there.

  Perhaps it’s partly a word frequency thing.

• [phisrow]

  And now that iOS supports limited multitasking you can play “Dueling Banjoes” while you text…

• [bfarn]

  Doesn’t autocorrect adapt to learn your…… nevermind.

• [darren]

  This is primarily why I continue to use a BlackBerry, despite owning (and loving) an number of iOS devices. Text input on the iPhone sucks. And it’s worse on Android.

  • [penguinchris]

    I’m not saying it’s perfect on Android – it’s not – but there are several alternative keyboards to the stock one available, and they all handle things like autocomplete differently. It’s almost impossible, therefore, for Android text entry to be categorically worse than iPhone, because chances are you can find a keyboard alternative that suits you well.

    On iPhone, you have to deal with what they give you and that’s it. Of course, you *can* turn off autocomplete if it “gets you” a lot, so that would help :)

  • [pidg]

    Smart Keyboard on Android costs pennies and works great.

    Also, the worst I’ve had on the stock Android keyboard was “let’s” instead of “lets” (which I found quite embarassing). Never anything as bad as some of the aberrations you see reported by iPhone users..

• [Anonymous]

  My Windows phone suggests “lolz” When I type “lol.” It doesn’t autocorrect, but it’s funny to see that suggestion come up… Right when I get the phone especially. :{D

• [Michael Smith]

  I once worked in a place where we wrote software to control variable message signs on freeways. These are signs where you can send it text or a chunky bitmap for display. The powers that be decided we would display traffic safety slogans as low priority messages so they sent a word document with message per line to be loaded into the system. One message said “Freeway emergency telephones are there for your convenience and safety” but unfortunately a spell checker changed “convenience” to “connivance”.

• [Anonymous]

  The iPhone autocorrect adapts to phrases you type regularly. All I can say is this user obviously says “Rape y’all” more than “Especially”. You can test this by resetting the iPhone dictionary and typing “Especiall” – I guarantee it won’t say “Rape y’all”

• [ScottTFrazer]

  Yeah. Er. Rob, unless that’s not your screenshot, that means you (or someone with access to your phone) typed “Rape y’all” into it at one point.

  Mine autocompletes that as “Especially”

• [Eark_the_Bunny]

  DERP YOU OTTO CONNECT!

  No I meant derp, not derp.

  Not derp, drop, drip, dupe.

  Oh to heck with it!

• [Nelson.C]

  The thing that especially pees me off about iOS autocorrect is that it always tries to correct my possessive ‘its’ to ‘it’s’. Every single time. I tried putting ‘its’ into the custom dictionary, but it’s still doing it.

  PS At least my iPad gets ‘especially’ right. Dunno what’s happened to your device, HeatherB, but it doesn’t look like a usual thing.

  • [HeatherB]

    Don’t think it’s typical either. I have gotten some weird ones other times like “bats lay night” which made no sense to me. And it also always wants to correct “Rob” to “Ron” no matter how many times I have typed it into the phone and I also always get “i’ll” when I try to say “ill” and “he’ll” for “hell” (and the it’s as well).
    I still can’t figure out where this came from though and after all, if I did type that it would have said “yinz” I’m in Pittsburgh after all.

• [airshowfan]

  I’m with Nelson C. I hate the persistent “it’s”.

  That having been said, overall I find the iPhone’s autocorrect to be worthwhile. It’s more of a benefit than a hassle. I especially appreciate not having to add apostrophes myself.

  Actually, now that I think back to when I got my iPhone, at first it was a huge pain because a lot of what I type is half-Portuguese half-English, and all kinds of common Portuguese words got mis-corrected. But I persisted, and in no time my phone was already anticipating my commonly-used Portuguese words and filling them in for me. Not bad.