Do your friends without iPhones wonder why you randomly send them texts with the word “utter” or “boner” in them? The answer, as you’ve explained over and over again, is iPhone auto-correct.
Now there is a blog where you can send your most entertaining auto-correct mishaps. Or you could shut off auto-correct.
Nah.
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As comical as it is when it screws something up, it is a pretty handy feature. I don’t usually bother backing up when I make a typo, because I know auto-correct will fix it. If you just pay attention to what it’s suggesting it’s not a problem.
err, turn off Wifi when you don’t need it?! I don’t seem to have that problem.
My gripe with my 4th gen iPod touch is with playing podcasts. Let’s say you’re playing one and stop it midway through. Then you get home and sync with new podcasts coming in. Now you go play one of those new podcasts. Guess where it begins playing? At the point you stopped the previous one! Extremely annoying. Hopefully that gets fixed with 4.2–and hopefully also the Greenp0ison/limera1n bunch move quickly to jailbreak it!
oops. This was meant to be a reply to another message made by Airintake. How it ended up here is beyond me — maybe iOS 4.1 is running the comment server here?!
Doesn’t it has an x button to ignore the auto correct for that word. People can’t press that, or are they that lazy?
Or can’t people reread it before they hit reply, or they really are that lazy?
You have to notice that it’s auto correcting. Usually I’m busy looking at the keyboard when I’m typing. No such thing as touch typing on an iPhone.
Typing too fast without paying attention to the screen, that’s why I do it: I type the word, there’s a typo, I don’t look, I hit space and it thinks I’m acknowledging the change it made and off we go.
Sometimes you type too fast to notice. Since it accepts the autocorrect word if you hit the space or a punctuation mark, you don’t always notice it if it’s the last word in a sentence and you hit send.
Of course, you can just turn autocorrect off…
That’s what I did. When I’m typing, I don’t want to be reading. It’s bad enough I have to pay attention to the little letter pop ups because there is no tactile feedback on the “keyboard”, but that’s a trade off I can live with.
Besides, auto-correct only guesses correctly maybe one time in five, and that little X is insanely hard to hit. It’s much more trouble than its worth.
Macgyver wrote: “Doesn’t it has an x button to ignore the auto correct for that word. People can’t press that, or are they that lazy?
Or can’t people reread it before they hit reply, or they really are that lazy?”
What about you? Were you too eager to slam the article or too lazy to correct your grammar before sending your reply? Were you hoping Consumerist had auto-correct for grammar to catch your mistakes? My guess is that people are human, make mistakes, and increasingly have to endure the comments of asses who wait in the shadows to ridicule the occasional minor blunder.
+1.
The only thing I would add to that is:
Does Macgyver have a sense of humor? All sources point to NO!
My experience with my iPad (i use it for web browsing only, it’s ridiculously handy due to the battery life) is that it will at times change words typed correctly into other words. It also has this thing where it will “remember” what characters were capitalized even when it auto capitalized them for you; e.g., if you type “it” and miss the t, it autocorrects to I, and if you hit backspace it capitalizes that space so you get It. There are tons of weird kinks, and the little x on autocorrect is just not easy enough to hit or quick enough or comprehensive enough to be able to solve them.
Just backspace one more time to erase the “memory” of having a capitalized letter there. It’s pretty easy to get used to doing.
That doesn’t work if the first character in the text is being capitalized…I don’t think?
That little x is probably the hardest button to push on the screen, ever. Stray outside of the small constrained area it provides for the x and the iOS assumes you meant to accept it. Of course when you delete the word and go to type it again, iOS handily offers up another auto-correction. Unfortunately the thing is handy when I actually DO mistype something or I’m typing an absurdly long word, so I can’t bring myself to turn it off. I’ll deal with the annoyances, but it can be made better. Especially by not accepting send when an autocorrect option is on the screen.
Oh, Droids are famous for this. I have one, so do many of my friends. We love the phones, but the auto-correct is horrid. Not only does it often pick an totally insane word instead of what you intended…. if you back up and change it it has been known to change it back to the wrong word as soon as you hit space. Therefore, unless you double check you think you fixed the error… nope there is goes.
Google Voice Text is even more fun. I won’t go further than to say I once went to respond to a co-worker with “I’ll be there pretty quick” and it ALMOST sent out “I have a d—”. Thankfully, I caught it before hitting send. Yikes!
Yeah, I love using VLingo to dictate my texts instead of typing them, because it’s SO much faster, but you do have to be careful and double check what it’s transcribing.
The app Better Keyboard is amazing, especially on Android 2.2. Auto correct is perfect on it
I so agree with this – OMG, some of the “corrections” my Droid has wanted to make are hysterical. Right after replacing the old phone with the Droid, my friends thought I’d lost my mind because I didn’t catch some of the corrections it had made. OTOH, it made for some interesting conversations, so win?
I use SwiftKey on my android… it works pretty well..
Good article on lifehacker today
http://lifehacker.com/5684573/five-alternative-android-keyboards-to-speed-up-mobile-touch-typing
Usually I don’t like this kind of thing, but I clicked through anyway and I have tears in my eyes from laughing so hard. I needed that today. Thanks Meg!
You are most welcome.
I’m only five messages in and I can’t hear the TV over my laughing!
yes omg, im laughing so hard people are looking at me crazy.. Im at work..
Same! Some of them were hilarious, some not so much. “Poofarts” was my favourite because you know that person had to teach the phone that word!
This is seriously the best website ever. I had to cover my mouth so I wouldn’t wake the baby!
I Lost a friend’s invitation in the mail one time. I tried to tell her as such Android auto-correct had me send “I lust your invitation.”
Facebook tells me we are in a relationship now.
Great site, thanks Consumerist!
Normally, I don’t mind the mistakes. Although let’s be real, Android–I’m almost never using the word “ducking.” I’m not being shot at.
Well, not unless, you are into “dacials” after the “ducking”.
For that, I created the following contact, only less censored:
Name : F*ck F*cking Z
Company : Sh*t Sh*tty C*ck C*nt
Now my profanity isn’t auto-corrected away.
A lot of this could be avoided if people, you know, simply LOOKED at what they were typing before they send off the message.
Where’s the fun in that?
I can deal with the sometimes-hilarious auto-correct on my iPod Touch 4. What I can’t deal with is my battery dying after 8 hours of standby due to some sort of bug in iOS 4 that leaves WiFi on at full power during standby.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2474499&tstart=0&messageID=12552709#12552709
94 pages and counting. I’m really hoping iOS 4.2 fixes this bug.
No kidding.
I’m glad I’m having this issue with an iPod Touch, rather than on an iPhone like some people. Having a portable media player die overnight is not fun, but having a primary communications device die every night is something I couldn’t tolerate for any amount of time.
My favorite is my friend the Harvard grad. Every time he types it the iPhone changes it to “garbage.”
I would say that’s about right, but he’ll kick my ass.
Even worse is the language filter that turns all of my “fuck”s into “duck”s…It’s hard to sound manly when people keep reading about cute little duckies…
Nokia used to be great for this. I never had to teach my Nokia phones how to swear, they came with the swears built in.
My favorite is when they think “sick” is “dick.” Friend of mine typed “sorry you are sick” it came out as, “sorry you ate dick.”
Mine used to do that, but it learned eventually.
I hated the way my Blackberry always changed “see” to “are”. I can’t tell you how many times I sent a message saying “I are what you’re saying” or “happy to are you”. The iPhone is way better than the Blackberry as far as that goes.
You should’ve just said it was Talk Like A Pirate Day.
What I really like about auto correct is that it chooses the most obscure words. It makes sense to turn the F word into “ducks” but once I start spelling a few wrong letters, it’ll turn it to really weird stuff like “prototypical” or “bolshevik.”
Not an iPhone, but a friend’s autocorrect made motherf*cker into “movief*cker”
Really, autocorrect? That’s how you handle that word?
I’ve had it with these monkey-fighting snakes on this Monday-to-Friday plane.
Best. Quote. Ever.
All these comments are making me laugh. I think I’m in a giggly mood anyway, but man. This whole article is totally making my day.
My Droid’s autocorrect was pretty terrible, so I turned it off. It still has a nice completion feature (displays possible completions above the keyboard, touch as needed), but it’s unfortunately not well sorted. It’ll display all manner of completely obscure, rarely-used words before the one I want, often forcing me to type all but the last letter or two.
Even more baffling is it leaves some words off the list until there’s no other option. This seems to be common with suffixes and compound words. I can’t recall any off hand, but if I type something ending with “-ing”, often I have to type everything but the “ing” before that suggestion appears; before that, only the base word is suggested.
It also has another annoying auto-”correct” that I can’t seem to turn off. If I type “foo :” it helpfully moves the colon to the end of the word, “foo: “. That’s great, except I almost never use colons in texts except to write “:p” and other smilies, so I have to backspace and do it again every time.
I hate when it turns 2 spaces into a period and a space.
My Blackberry keeps turning the word “hat” into “gay.” I text and tweet about knitting a lot. This doesn’t end well.
My iPhone turned “Netflix” into “negroid” once… I caught it and changed it, but grabbed a screenshot first. I should submit it to that site.
MINE DID TOO!!! I didn’t take a screen shot. I was sending my friend a note about how I forwarded an email what should have been “Sent you an email for free Netflix for a month” turned into “sent you an email for free negroid for a month” I didn’t catch it before I sent it. Luckily my friend has a good sense of humor. It was embarrassing though.
Also, WHY is that word even in the auto correct???????
Oh bloody hell. The first one had me laughing so hard my sides hurt. I’m afraid to scroll down.
Its not only Iphone and Droids. Samsun phones auto correct is horrible. I think they do it to make us look crazy to our friends.
I use swiftkey with Android and disabled the autocorrect if I hit space, if I need the word corrected I just use one of the suggestions.
PS SwiftKey that’s the best keyboard I’ve come across on Android, the word suggestions are incredible and it gets better as you use it. It works on english language sentence structure, not just what you type, so it’s able to suggest the next word based on another word. So great to be able to choose keyboards instead of just getting what Apple gives out. http://www.swiftkey.net/
My favorite was when auto-correct suggested the word “amulet”. Really? I don’t even remember what I was typing but I wish it was about amulets.
There is that little (x) you can tap as the iWhatever auto-corrects you to tell it “hey stupid, you’re wrong!” I in fact find it amusing the way it suggests “duck” when I’m typing a certain other word that rhymes with “duck.” Guess which word and win the Obvious Award for today!
Giraffe?
Fuck
These are great! My iPhone fails on auto correct often, but it’s still a handy feature. Just backspace and it will offer you to change it to before it corrected it, but many times I type so fast I hit send before I catch it.
I use the voice system that is part of Android for most of my text inputs. It is surprisingly accurate.
It works about 95% of the time now that I know how to speak plainly and without speed change or inflection. When it does not work, it is hilarious like Google Voice transcriptions. The only problem is that it does not do punctuation.
I wonder how long it will take before we all learn how to talk in a manner that is appropriate for Google/Kinect/Apple? They can teach it in school instead of typing (and again, instead of writing).
I once had my auto-correct change the word “texting” to “rectum” in a text message. That lead to a rather aardvark conversation.
I use Dragon Dictation on my iPhone for wordy texts, but for the most part I’ve got tiny little callouses on the “corners” of my thumbs, next to my nail – makes for pretty accurate typing.
What I find hilarious are the transcripts of voice mails I get from Google Voice, especially from my heavily accented Polish friends.
So I must be slow… What did the person type that was auto-corrected to “utter”?