Tuesday, November 7, 2017

iOS 11 Autocorrect Bug

Are you having a tough time typing a lowercase “i” on the iPhone lately? It’s not just you.

If you updated your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to iOS 11.1 and find that when you type the letter “i” it autocorrects to the letter “A” with a symbol, learn what to do.

Nick Heer:

Apple suggests creating a text replacement shortcut to swap the letter I for the letter i. Yeah, really. They also say that they’re going to fix this in an update soon.

John Gruber:

What I’ve heard is that this is a machine learning problem — that, more or less, for some reason the machine learning algorithm for autocorrect was learning something it never should have learned.

Update (2017-11-07): Jeremy Burge (via Rosyna Keller):

What’s really going on is that the letter “I” is being appended with an invisible character known as Variation Selector 16 when auto-correct kicks in to replace the lowercase “i”.
This VS-16 character is intended to be used to make the previous character have emoji appearance. When used in conjunction with the letter “I” it displays in some apps as “A ⍰”.
The correct behaviour should be to ignore the invisible variation selector if the previous character doesn’t have an emoji version.

Artificial Intelligence Auto-Correction Bug Emoji iOS iOS 11 Unicode