YOUR iPhone has a seriously clever auto-correct, but it’s not perfect.
If you constantly find yourself being frustrated by it, there may be a solution.
1
What is auto-correct on iPhone?
Auto-correct is an automatic tool on your iPhone that attempts to help you improve what you type.
For instance, if you typed out “I om happy today”, your phone would fix it to say “I am happy today”.
It does this by comparing your text to an enormous (and constantly evolving) digital dictionary.
It’s not always right, however. Sometimes, it can frustratingly “fix” things you never wanted it to – and it’s ducking infuriating.
Fix autocorrect blunders
If a common word or phrase you use keeps getting autocorrected by your iPhone, simply add it to your mobile’s dictionary.
Go to Settings, General, Keyboard and then “Text Replacement”.
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Tap the plus sign in the top right corner and enter the word you want saved.
How you can use auto-correct better
Ken Kocienda, who led the team building the first keyboard on Apple’s original iOS software, has revealed the inner workings of auto-correct.
According to Lifehacker, former Apple software boss Kocienda says auto-correct asks three key questions when you type out a word on your iPhone.
They are:
- What other words in the dictionary would involve similar “tap” patterns?
- Which of these words is the most common, and how much more common is it?
- Which of these words appears in your “dynamic dictionary”, a list of your most frequently used words, and words you’ve re-typed?
Apple’s iPhone uses all of this information, weighs it up, and makes a decision about your typing.
Usually what happens is when we type a word and Apple gets it wrong, we’ll go back and change it immediately.
But Kocienda, in his new book ‘Creative Selection: Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs’, says this is a very inefficient way of typing.
That’s because Apple will sometimes fix, and then un-fix, your words much later on in a sentence, once it has more information about what you’re typing.
So although it might get it wrong at first, it’ll look correct by the time you finish your sentence.
That means you’ll end up fixing less auto-correct errors if you leave it until the very end of your message – rather than fixing each error immediately.
Basically, Kocienda says you should trust auto-correct, because it’s smarter than you give it credit for.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
