[the-facts-machine] Kim Komando: Autocorrect seems to have a mind of its own
- From: Steve <pipeguy920@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <the-facts-machine@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2017 16:11:31 -0400
BlankAutocorrect seems to have a mind of its own By Kim Komando, @kimkomando,
Special for USA TODAY
Oh, autocorrect! Sometimes, you're so handy. You see the
word "brain" and know I meant "Brian. You instantly switch letters around,
turning nonsense into coherent words. You complete me -- or, more accurately,
you complete my sentences. So why do you have to drive me so crazy? Why do you
take the words I intended to type and completely rearrange them? Why must you
turn "Missy" into "Mossy," or "so" into "do," or "well" into "we'll"? Why can't
you accept the things I type into that tiny keyboard, except when I
obviously intended something else?
Most autocorrect errors are funny, like a digital Mad Libs. But sometimes we
send messages without realizing how embarrassing they are.
Here's the good news: You have a lot of power over the autocorrect feature on ;
your iOS Phone. After all, your phone is trying to learn from you.
There are several tactics you can use to prevent misunderstandings in the
future.
Turn off autocorrect
Yes, you can just turn it off. Autocorrect may seem like a permanent fixture,
but you can disable it whenever you like. No more bad guesses. No more awkward
miscommunications. You simply type what you mean, letter by letter, and if
something is misspelled, so be it.
Turning it off is pretty simple. Just tap Settings, General, Keyboard, then
toggle Auto-Correction
to Off. Follow the same steps to turn autocorrect back on whenever you need it
again.
Reset your keyboard dictionary
Deep inside your phone, there is a tiny dictionary. This verbal database
determines whether your words are spelled correctly, and everything you type is
checked against this list.
But the more you use your phone, the more you may accidentally save words to
the
dictionary that aren't correct. Over time, these misspellings can add up,
meaning more frustration for you.
Luckily, you can essentially "reboot" your keyboard's dictionary. Just go to
Settings, General, Reset, then Reset Keyboard Dictionary. Once you've done
this, your dictionary is a clean slate, the same as when you first bought your
phone. Now you can begin "training" your autocorrect to respond to your
preferences, and all of those misspelled words will have magically been erased.
Train as you go
When you misspell a word in iOS, autocorrect usually jumps in with the correct
spelling. It can also fill in words it recognizes before you fully type them.
Just hit the spacebar or tap your finger on the word to accept the autocorrect
suggestion.
But this can also be frustrating. You've probably done this a thousand times:
iOS guesses the wrong word,
over and over. By the time you've typed the full word "marginal," iOS has
already guessed "My," "Maybe," "Man," "Mary," "Maria," "Math," "Marge,"
"Margi,"
"Margo," "Margin," "Margins," "Marginally" and "Marginalized.
If you hit one of these guesses by accident, you have to delete letters and go
back. Meanwhile,
iOS may think it's guessing correctly, especially if you accidently press the
spacebar.
This will cause autocorrect to learn from a mistake, which could cause problems
later on.
To counter this, start typing your word, and when autocorrect guesses the wrong
word, tap the X in the autocorrect bubble and
override the suggestion. This slows you down a little at first, but iOS will
learn your preferences very quickly and will stop suggesting it.
Text replacement
If you're feeling ambitious, you can program your phone to replace one phrase
with another. These shortcuts can be very handy and save you a lot of typing
time.
Here's a typical example:
You want to say "on my way," but instead you type "OMW. With one little trick,
your phone can automatically turn "OMW" into "On my way. Or you can turn "BRB"
into "Be right back," or "1234" into "Four Score and Seven Years Ago. Anything
you feel like.
Here's what you do:
Go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Text Replacement, Tap the + sign.
Here, you add the complete sentence to the Phrase field, in this case "On my
way.
In the Shortcut field, you put "OMW."
On the flip side, if you leave the Shortcut field blank, then autocorrect will
stop trying to correct the spelling of that word or phrase. From now on, you
can
type that word and autocorrect theoretically should ignore it.
Turn off predictive text
As you type, you'll notice words popping up between the keyboard and the text.
This feature is called "predictive text," because your phone is trying to guess
the next word you want to type. Because your phone learns from your vocabulary,
predictive text should become more accurate as time goes on.
But the opposite is also true: When you make mistakes, predictive text starts
guessing incorrectly because it is using incorrect data to anticipate your word
choice.
One nice thing about predictive text is that you can easily toggle while typing
to turn it on and off. Here's how you do it:
Open the Messenger app, press and hold the keyboard button (where you enable
your emojis) and toggle on (or off) the "Predictive" option.
Alternatively, in iOS 10, go to Settings, General, Keyboard, then toggle the
"Predictive" option to Off.
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