How To Fix AutoCorrect

Written by

Walter G.

Published on

August 30 2016

Modified on

September 01 2021

Filed under

web-development

I have auto-correct turned on all the time on my phone, but I hate it. Can't stand it. And for the life of me, I can't understand why I keep using it. Probably because it tricks my mind into thinking that I'm typing super fast, when in reality I'm spending a relatively large amount of time correcting every other word.

And it's not that the idea of auto-correcting and spell checking is bad, no at all. The idea is great. Us humans with our hulking hands and our tiny tiny phones needs a little guidance sometimes. Also maybe we suck at spelling, which brings up another interesting point. Is all this "helpful" technology causing us to lose our perspicacity. Or is it in the last place we least expected? But that's a post for another time I think. For now, keyboards.

Where to begin...

As if I need to state any of these problems.There are a few issues with keyboard apps, and together they all join forces to cause the main problem. And that is accuracy. The kind of accuracy that brings your stress hormone to new heights about 8-20 times per minute. So let's break down how we ended up with the most advanced computers in the palm of our hands, yet we can't for the life of us type "that sounds like shit Jimmy", without it getting converted to "that sings like ships Timmy".

That sounds like shit Jimmy

The definition of "correct" varies

This is the most obvious reason, of course. People are different. They act differently, they dress differently, and they even speak differently. These apps, tend to be very computational for the most part. They know that "car" is pretty darn close to "cat", but not much else. They don't understand context or anything.

Which again, is just fine. We don't really need these apps to understand context. We just need them to understand words. My words to be exact. And your words. For example, I don't have a cat, so more than likely my usage of that word is relatively low. However, I do like cars and frequently conversate about such things. So having "cst" corrected to "car" would make some form of sense.

we just need them to understand words

Even easier, is that most people only use a handful of words per day out of their massive vocabulary. And most of those are of course the common words, such as "I", "and", "but", and "the".

There's money to be made

Again, not being in the million dollar keyboard industry, I can't for sure say, but maybe this has some sway on how apps work nowadays. When you have millions of dollars running behind the scenes, that is going to affect the underlying product. All of these keyboard apps collect data. What they do with said data, I have no idea. Maybe they use it to improve their algorithms, maybe they use it for statistical purposes.

Or maybe said data is sold off to various 3rd parties. Regardless of where it's going, there is a monetary value attached to the letters that you type on a daily basis. And as we all know, many times when money is involved, that tends to sway the usability and usefulness of many products.

Swyping

I enjoy swyping, I'll admit. It gives me the illusion that I'm sending messages so fast to my friends. But it suffers from the same problems. In fact, it's even worse when I type in an unrecognized word, because now I have to delete the whole thing and start over.

Not to mention, it's yet another distraction in the long battle against word inaccuracy.

The simple solution

So there are about 84,042 keyboard apps out now on the old app markets. And instead of piling on yet another one to the list, I'm just going to write here what I think would fix the problem. Not an advanced AI, not a supercomputer listening to you to better match your verbiage. Just one simple thing.

REMEMBER THE WORDS THAT "I" USE!

That's it. really. Just keep a running counter, or weight, of non-common words. For example:

• "Ship" -> 2
• "Shit" -> 2,365

• "Jimmy" -> 1
• "Timmy" -> 3,400

One of those words, is not like the other. And that's it. You don't have to send my preferences to the cloud for protection. You don't need to send anything anywhere. Just keep a counter of my most common words. There's probably like 100 words tops, I promise.

Let's take the following sentence for example:

send me the link

Now we can remove the common words:

As soon as I hit send on my phone, these weights get recalculated. There's of course the chance that one day I'll have to ask someone for "ink", though not likely, and I'll be angered at the sight of the word "link" appearing.

That's why we can't have nice things

The biggest barrier to innovation is complexity. Sometimes things are simple, but they're not colorful enough, so we keep adding to them until they are no longer what we once envisioned them to be. Keyboard apps don't need cloud storage, or emoji predictions or even the swiping features. They just need to work. They need to take 4 to 10 characters, and do their best to guess what the intended word is.

the biggest barrier to innovation is complexity

So let's just keep it simple and make sure that whatever we build in the future works to the best of our abilities, before we start to pile on the features.

You know what. Maybe I will work on this keyboard app. Maybe we shouldn't just stand around while poor apps take over the app stores, just because they have fancier logos and a million dollar marketing budget.

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