iOS Auto-Correction From Contacts
Imagine being in charge of an algorithm that hundreds of millions of users depend on every day and saying, “Hey, let’s take any word that’s capitalized in your contacts and just always capitalize it in text messages!”
“What could POSSIBLY go wrong? Unless you subscribe to ‘One Medical’ or ‘Capital One’ and you ever want to type ‘one’ to someone. But who would do that?”
Update (2018-02-13): Nick Heer:
It’s not just contact names that inform the autocorrect dictionary: any capitalized word in a contact record will be fed into the dictionary, as will installed apps. So, if you know someone who works at, say, Apple, or you have the Transit app installed, you will find yourself regularly undoing the automatic capitalization of those words when talking about fruit or the very concept of public transit.
Update (2018-02-28): Mark Rogowsky:
Forget privacy concerns, iOS does not ever learn that:
1) I did not want that proper name from my contacts. I always correct its autocorrect.
2) I’ve literally not used that proper name in years.
The algorithm has a default problem and a no-learning problem.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
I ended up deleting a seldom-used contact whose last name is "Ng" because of all the times an "ing" ending was changed to " Ng" (e.g., "eating" became "eat Ng")
Ugh yeah. Auto-correct has gotten way worse. Between that and the iMessage out of order bug (still there in 11.2.5), messaging is frustrating.
Auto-correct is the bane of my life. What I really hate is when you delete the autp-corrected nonsense, then try and re-type the word and it just gets autocorrected again. It's no fun.
