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Have you ever tried typing something but your phone keeps changing it to something else?
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This ducking keyboard can be so frustrating!
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It can seem like autocorrect is working against you instead of helping you.
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But the iPhone has had autocorrect for over ten years.
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Why does it still suck?
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Whether you're on iPhone or Android, using the default keyboard, or a third-party app you deal with autocorrect every single day.
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Usually, it works great, but sometimes it completely refuses to understand what you typed.
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To figure out what's happening we have to understand how autocorrect works.
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When you type something on a phone, there's a lot of work going on in the background.
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The phone analyzes your input and compares it to stored dictionaries and language models.
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The phone then tries to correctly interpret the word or phrase you're trying to type.
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So when you type "fopd" your phone changes it to "food" because "fopd" isn't a word, but it's only one letter away from "food."
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But not every example is this obvious.
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The vowels U, I, and O are very close to each other, so a word like put, pit, and pot those, those were real challenges.
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That's Ken Kocienda, he's one of the people who developed autocorrect for Apple.
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We spoke with Ken to find out what's happening inside of autocorrect.
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My job was to come up with a way to make speedy and accurate typing possible on a sheet of glass.
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The hardest part isn't correcting spelling or grammar, it's interpreting what you meant to say from what you wrote.
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And autocorrect is actually pretty good at this, but users tend to notice autocorrect only when it makes mistakes.
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If it does what it's supposed to do 19 times, and then that 20th time it makes a mistake that is either distracting or embarrassing, that one mistake wipes out the positive feelings that people have for the 19 times where it just worked.
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This is especially obvious when autocorrect leads to unwanted changes.
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Sometimes it can feel like you're fighting against your keyboard.
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Mostly people complain about how autocorrect gets in the way of their swearing.
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The ducking keyboard.
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The iPhone keyboard will let you swear, it just wants to prevent you from accidentally sending a word that you didn't mean to send.
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It might seem like you're always wrestling with autocorrect, but you can take control of your dictionary.
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On iOS go into Settings, General, Keyboard, and then tap "Add Shortcut" or "Text Replacement."
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Here you can add a new word or a shortcut that fills in a word when you type a few letters.
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You can Google around to find out how to add words to the various versions of Android or third-party keyboards.
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So, you might still think autocorrect sucks, but it's actually gotten a lot better since version one, and some developers have introduced new tools like swipe to type to make typing on a smartphone easier.
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In the future, machine learning might create an autocorrect that's more accurate than ever, but whatever the technology is we can't lose sight of the original goal of autocorrect.
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The goal that I like to think about for the product is for it to have the software melt away.
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Autocorrection is not supposed to be glamorous, right?
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It's just supposed to be useful.
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Autocorrect is far from perfect, but our messages would look a lot worse without it.