Until I went into the iPhone settings to get rid of it manually, I was haunted by the most classic of keyboard errors. You will all remember it (and maybe some are still a victim): it was enough to type “knows” for the operating system to interpret it as an abbreviation for “I’m coming!”. A choice similar to the one that automatically transforms “cmq” into “anyway”, but with one big difference: “sa” is also the third singular voice of a widespread verb like “know”.
Apple, a patent to correct SMS even after sending
10 February 2014
Result? A thousand times I have happened to write phrases like “Mom lo I’m coming!”. If similar things still happen to you on your iPhone, to get rid of them you have to go to “Settings” → “General” → “Keyboard” and then “Text Replacement”. There you can take a look at the preset abbreviations – or those that you may have entered without calculating the downsides – and do a bit of order.
Smartphone
iPhone, do-it-yourself repair: Apple’s program is underway
by Andrea Nepori
02 Maggio 2022
The well-known case of “I’m coming!” it is certainly not the only nasty mistake these automatic systems make us fall into. Although it does not concern the iPhone, the problem of Google Docs (cloud writing program) is now famous – and still unsolved – which suggests correcting with the wrong “what is” every time someone writes correctly “what è ”without apostrophe. In this case – since Docs is a cloud program that learns from the way in which all its users write – the problem is that, obviously, most Italians commit one of the most classic grammatical errors of our language, thus teaching it to intelligence. artificial by Google
Even within the iPhone, however, the artificial intelligence behind the automatic correction is sometimes unpredictable. First of all, how does Autocorrect work on iPhone? Joanna Stern of the Washington Post got this explained directly by Ken Kocienda, who is the man who invented this system before leaving Apple in 2017. “When you type, the self-correcting algorithm tries to figure out in advance what you want. write observing various elements, including where your fingers landed on the keyboard and what are the other words in the sentence, while comparing this fragment of the word with those included in two invisible dictionaries ”.
Safety
Stop the thieves: Apple will no longer repair iPhones marked as “lost” or stolen
by Simone Cosimi
31 March 2022
The first of these two dictionaries is the static one: built into iOS, it contains the most common words and names, including those of some football products or teams. Then there is the dynamic dictionary, which is created over time as we use the phone. This consists of our unique words. Maybe the surname of a friend of ours entered in the address book or the names of the apps installed.
Then there are some words (often slang or that we use with close friends) that we normally use but that do not exist in traditional dictionaries. Also in this case, and always taking advantage of machine learning algorithms, the iPhone learns with use: the third time you type that word, your phone learns that it is a word you want to use and adds it to the dynamic dictionary, quitting so to turn it into something else. “The static and dynamic dictionary will then wage a little battle between them,” explained Kocienda. “The software is designed to pick the winner, but it doesn’t always pick what you wanted.”
What to do in cases where the correction system keeps changing the words to something else (or suggesting wrong ones, if you have disabled the automatic correction)? Here is a little trick that may be useful for you: go back to the keyboard settings and enter “Text replacement”. Here you enter the word that continues to be corrected in both the “phrase” and the “abbreviation” fields. This way, the self-correcting system will leave you alone.
My personal torture, on the other hand, is slightly different. Since I changed the iPhone, for some strange reason the phone no longer immediately understands when I want to write “there” and when instead “there”, often making me fall into a “there” that I am terribly ashamed of. In this case, I can’t tell the iPhone to always replace “ce” with “there”, as they are both common words. The compromise was to insert the text “there” in the Replacement, explaining that it must change it to “there”. It is less immediate than it used to be, but at least it allows me to avoid bad figures.
But there are some words that the iPhone never learns, no matter how many times you type them on your smartphone. It’s the bad words. As they say in these cases, the fact that the iPhone does not learn “is not a bug but a feature”. As for swear words, in fact, they are all present in the static dictionary of the iPhone, but next to them they have a virtual asterisk with the inscription: “Never help anyone to type these words”. It is not moralism, but the will to avoid that self-correction, by making a mistake, change some unknown word into a dirty word while perhaps you are writing an email to the boss or to the grandmother.
Between misunderstandings, errors and precautions, however, there is one thing for which I will always be grateful to my iPhone: it always advises me correctly to use “what is”, strictly without apostrophe. At least in that, it definitely wins on Google.