I am a fan of autocorrect. And I hate it, too.
I love autocorrect when it helps me properly spell a difficult or mis-typed word or when it speeds up my typing by properly predicting the next word I’d like to type.
The single thing that makes me hate autocorrect turns out to be something relatively easy to fix. When I am typing or tapping and I type a word or phrase that is oddly spelled, or a name made up of other words, autocorrect kicks in and “fixes” things. Sometimes I’ll be several words down the road before I realize it, sometimes I watch it happen as I type, sort of like watching a slow motion car crash, powerless to do anything other than let it play out. We’ve all been there.
Predictive text is a move in the right direction, but there are too many cases where it doesn’t offer the branch you need and autocorrect kicks in despite your best efforts.
I’d like to suggest two solutions.
First, I’d love to see an autocorrect canceling gesture, a gesture like pinch to zoom, double-tap to select a word, and swipe to get to another part of the interface. These gestures are used everywhere and work very well. I’m not suggesting a specific gesture, but when the autocorrect canceling gesture is detected, iOS or OS X would undo the last autocorrect, even if it was five words ago. Gesture again without typing and the autocorrect is redone (a cancel undo, if you will).
Second, I’d love to see an autocorrect disable gesture. Make the gesture and autocorrect is disabled until you gesture again, turning it back on. So if you knew you were about to type some juicy autocorrect bait, you could disable it, type your text, then enable it again.
Obviously, both gestures need to be extremely lightweight, quick to perform, or the solution will outweigh the problem. When I think about gestures, I imagine having a button dedicated to this task, within easy reach of one of my fingers, but impossible to click accidentally. If I had such a button to press to cancel an autocorrect, that would make autocorrect a boon instead of a mix of boon and bane.
What are you telling us for? Get Jim to call Tim already.
I wouldn’t be opposed to this, but personally I don’t have much problem with the way it is now (using that tiny, tiny, “x”). The biggest problem I have with autocorrect is how dumb it is.
By that I mean sometimes I am typing fast, in the middle of an idea, and I notice it’s going to autocorrect, so I quickly jump back, highlight the corrected word and re-type, then it autocorrects to the same wrong word again. You can repeat this cycle a bunch of times before the system gets the idea that maybe you don’t want this correction.
It ruins everything and stops your typing dead in the water. There should be a way for autocorrect to only offer a suggestion on a word once, and then stop offering it once you’ve told it that it was wrong. It seems that once you leave the general area of the cursor by a couple of characters, autocorrect becomes dumb as crap.
It’s always amazed me that they didn’t hook up the ‘shake to undo’ for autocorrect. Any time you get an autocorrect you don’t like just give the phone a quick twitch and it would put back in the word you originally typed. Easypeasy.
And per Prof. Peabody’s note – he’s spot on. Compare the way Microsoft Word deals with hitting ctrl-z/undo (or even going back and fixing something manually) when it makes an autocorrect. It’s smart enough to just try it once and then leave you alone. IOS and OSX are much more aggressive, and thus much less friendly.
I was thinking about this yesterday as I was typing on my iPhone. The “wrong” word (in iOS 8) often ends up in the first predictive box, it’s usually easy enough to tap on it quickly to choose it (often I know I’m abbreviating or typing something that the iPhone won’t like – I guess it’s teaching me as I teach it). Unfortunately words tend to bounce around way too quickly in those boxes, and it’s not completely consistent. It would be great if you could change the default to always have the word you’re typing in the left box, and have the other 2 for predictive words. Pinching, shaking, using more than 1 finger to change a word are all too distracting while you’re typing.
I’m no programmer, but I think the reason it works this way is that autocorrect only works at the point of the cursor, and is unaware of text that’s already been typed a couple of characters “downstream” as it were. The corrections (in the form of the squiggly underlines) elsewhere are probably produced by a different “engine” altogether.
It seems like integrating the two, as well as giving us more control over both would be the thing to do.
I long for the ability to actually edit the dictionary for instance. I’m a writer, and if you are writing a book with a character with a name that isn’t in the dictionary (most aren’t), then it get’s the squiggly underline for all 600 pages, which is damn annoying. We should definitely be able to add and delete words from the dictionary for starters.
WebOS had this completely fixed. It marked autocorrected words. You could type your text quickly, and then go through the autocorrected words to make sure they were correct. Tapping one would offer other suggestions, including whatever you actually typed. I don’t understand how this isn’t a basic feature of every single smartphone.
My impression is the first box is always your word, exactly as typed. Thus the quotes around it.
I wish spelling correction were smarter. I’ll often watch obvious typos flow by that 1) are not fxed. 2) are not flagged with a red underline such that I could quickly tap and correct. Instead I have to manually select the word and fix. The hell.
I really don’t know how spelling correction works in iOS thse days.
Give the Nintype keyboard a shot for a very different take on autocorrect. It’s not simple; it has a lot of candy; it’s not for everyone. But it seems HIGHLY configurable, and has some REALLY great features inculding better auto correction, and a better backspace. It’s faster than Swiftkey to launch, too. I’ve been using it for about 4 days now and I’m still not using half of what it can do.