
Things I'd Change About Auto-Correct - NaOH
https://techreflect.net/2020/04/29/10-things-id-change-about-auto-correct
======
crazygringo
> _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.

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OceanKing
Regarding 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
I 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
Wait, what? I've used that, but I don't think I've ever seen Slack _fix the
original_!

~~~
thomasahle
Yeah, 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
Slack 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
Ha, 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.

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renewiltord
I 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
_Valid word won 't autocorrect_

In my experience, my Android phone replaces valid words all the time to my
great annoyance.

~~~
Infinitesimus
What keyboard do you use? I've noticed this on Samsung's default keyboard as
well and might switch to GBoard.

~~~
nyhc99
I'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."

------
carlob
I 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
On 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)

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WalterBright
I spend more time fixing autocorrect errors than my own errors. Turned it off.
Don't miss it.

~~~
_trampeltier
I 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.

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Sharlin
Autosuggestions are useful. Being able to cycle between different
autocompletions is useful. But autocorrection is worse than useless.

------
m463
I 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
Absolutely. iOS and android, and the microsoft swiftkey on android, I have an
N problem. Comeone adaptive space detection!

------
makecheck
I 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.)

------
resters
I 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.

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jariel
For #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.

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JoeAltmaier
Is this ignoring the elephant on the table? Why is it so frickin hard to type
correctly on a phone?

~~~
jariel
It wasn't a problem with BlackBerry.

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loopz
Turn 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
Yep, 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.

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enriquto
The 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
Same, 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.

~~~
Ndymium
I 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.

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huffmsa
#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.

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acrooks
Once my phone learns that I never intentionally write the word "ducking" I
will be happy.

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hoseja
Why does anyone let autocorrect actually _change_ their words? Just let it
suggest a correction and pick it, are people really this lazy?

~~~
whitehouse3
Because 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.

