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Comment by antoineMoPa | Hacker News Reader

Autocorrection in general is bad. Underlining errors and proposing corrections is OK. As a keyboard user, I expect what I type to show as-is on the screen. I can always correct later.

Also, autocorrection does not provide proper feedback to learn from mistakes. Underlining errors does.

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I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant.

As a thought experiment, consider voice input. Voice input is often used when a screen isn't even available for feedback, so the computer has to figure out if it thinks it transcribed you correctly. To make the usability bearable (and to keep the computational difficulty down), contemporary systems don't ask you for clarification; they just try to transcribe your sentence against a dictionary. For the voice-controlled systems of today, "autocorrect" is definitely part of the input mechanism.

On Android, there is a top strip of suggested words that you can tap (seems to be one on iPhone?). It's pretty decent, and is definitely a part of how I type, which is basically, type 2 to 3 letters, tap the word I want. I can write some lengthy emails quickly using this style of typing, and I really don't use autocorrect that much.

Touch-screen typing is an entirely different interface than a physical keyboard.

I somewhat agree with this compensation logic, however, I think the correction is not intelligent enough to be bearable yet (Not context-aware, no grammar support, poor support across languages, etc.). I type my stuff faster without autocorrect.

Also, the post is about a macbook, which has a keyboard.

Yes, the TFA is about a laptop from a maker who popularized autocorrect on smartphones. In the early days, spellcheck was an application-level concern, but its presence in smartphone platforms as an OS-level service made them part of user and developer expectations.

Nowadays, macOS, Windows, and Chrome OS all come with built-in spellcheck, with various levels of default autocorrect.

> I've seen people argue that autocorrect is part of the input mechanism of on-screen smartphone keyboards. The rationale goes, with a physical keyboard of respectable size, you make much fewer typing mistakes than with a virtual keyboard on flat glass where the touch targets are tiny. To compensate for the inferior precision, autocorrect comes in to figure out what you meant.

That's a nice theory; the problem is that autocorrect is often stunningly bad at that, and turns slight typos into radically different words. Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements.

Voice control is, obviously, a whole different kettle of fish since you don't have a text input stream to start with.

> Humans are very good at getting the correct sense from text with typos, but not so much with arbitrary replacements.

That assumes that you leave the typos in place rather than fixing them. If your goal is to type error-free text, then which one leads to the correct text faster? Autocorrect and then fixing the occasional word it gets wrong, or trying to edit away typos on a tiny screen?

The problem is you have to notice the autocorrect error quickly to be sure of that working. When you miss one and notice it later, you may have forgotten what word you intended. It's also more of a problem when you don't notice it, as it may change your meaning or render it incomprehensible to a message recipient.

I notice this kind of problem a lot with dictation, where it can completely transform the look of a word, and I sometimes have to say it out loud to try and figure out what I might have meant that sounds similar.

The goal is to communicate meaning. If you don't have an army of editors between you and your readers, it is unlikely that you'll achieve error-free text, and typos left in place is better at communicating meaning. Autocorrection is a lossy, information-destroying transformation.

A correctable error (e.g. a typo, as most will still be understood) is better than an uncorrectable error (e.g. a change to a word that may still made sense in the context). Offering to correct a word, rather than silently doing it, will like lead to correct text, rather than text that _appears_ correct faster - I can very quickly scan for a UI prompt suggesting there is a typo, but I might never notice when a word is silently changed for me.

I've noticed this on Windows Phone - on WP8, the background colour of the suggested word briefly changes on an automatic correction, so it's easy to notice and double-check it's done the right thing. On WP10, it only gets slightly bolded and only until you hit space. I've had multiple emails where I've not noticed a erroneous correction until I'm later re-reading it for whatever reason.

> Offering to correct a word, rather than silently doing it, will like lead to correct text, rather than text that _appears_ correct faster

Android's approach is to take confidence in the correction into account: if it's extremely sure it'll auto-correct, if it's less sure it'll just offer. And either way, the UI makes it clear when either of those things has happened.

Particularly given that typos are typically resulting in a non existing word. Auto-replacement in some correct word that would make sense in the current context, even if it says something radically different that what was intended.

> That's a nice theory; the problem is that autocorrect is often stunningly bad at that

It gets even worse for some non-English languages. The standard way to do autocorrect seems to be roughly "pick the the word I know that has the lowest Levenshtein distance from whatever that was typed". The problem with this is that in, for example, Finnish, every word has a few dozen conjugated forms that have a very short Levenshtein distance to the original word, each of those has a few dozen more conjugated forms that have a short distance to them, etc etc until each Finnish base noun has roughly ~2000 conjugated forms and every verb has ~12000 of them.

No autocorrect system in existence actually knows the rules on how to form those words, and none of them actually have anywhere near all of them stored, either. The result is that the minute you output anything even remotely complex it gets autoincorrected to something else. Despite this, most devices and software ships with autocorrect on. The first thing most Finns do is turn it off.

The irony of it is that even if you had perfect autocorrect, it really would not be that helpful near the endings of words, simply because the possibility space is so full of correct words that a typo has a good chance of hitting one.

German here. Autocorrect is useless when using slang words or dialect, conjugations/grammar rules, and mixing languages (like adding in English words), which happens quite frequently

> pick the the word I know that has the lowest Levenshtein distance from whatever that was typed

I'm pretty sure that in fact it is frequency weighted. You can see that when a correct but rare word is replaced by a much more frequent word.

It would be cool to present both to the reader somehow. They already have it for the writer.

At some point gesture typing got turned on on my android phone, found it by accident, and then tried it out. I really like it much better than tapping. Smooth circling gestures gets the word displayed and the row of three alternative mappings almost always has the word I want if its first guess was wrong.

This was especially nice for me as my natural finger hits about 1/8 of an inch to the right of where I think it should. Is there any way to calibrate the touch position on android to fix this problem? Google fails me and, if this is not possible, it seems the tech industry has also. I have Android 8.0.0.

That may be true, but the reported behavior is on desktop/laptop MacOS.

What I think I'd like is to type a whole input and then go back and select corrections all in a batch. The correction mode could use more of the screen to help you go faster, plus take advantage of rightward context as well as leftward. Very probable corrections could take advantage of Fitts' law or maybe grouping of multiple corrections into one.

The goal is to never get 'corrected' without my assent, while still going fast. This might be underexplored, because designers aim to keep it easy for everyone without training. (But this is also likely just a bad idea. I mostly just don't type on phones and curse them when I do.)

Autocorrect is okay for meaningless rants to your brogrammer. Autocorrect should be off for documents as a rule, unless you click a button to autocorrect everything, or turn it on specifically. Plus, you don't autocorrect words you don't understand that are long and big, there are metrics for measuring that.

The problem comes when autocorrect is too aggressive and changes things that are already correct. Correcting, say, "inferoor" to "inferior" is useful on devices where mistakes are commonplace. However, these are examples that I've notice my phone "correct" over the last few months, often changing the entire meaning or making it nonsensical:

"if" or "is" to I; "ran" to "Ra"; "nan" to "Na"; "drew" to "are"; "near" to "new"

I've also had a couple of occasions where trying to type a specific letter has resulted in the letter to either side (e.g. "o" or "p" when trying to type "i") and it's taken multiple tries to hit the right letter because the device thinks it knows better and has (presumably) made the touch target so tiny (and I know it's not a hardware/screen issue, because I've seen the keyboard display that you've hit a certain key then input something different)

These sound more like bugs than a correctly functioning autocorrect. Apple's autocorrect has had some serious bugs like you mentioned, e.g. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208240 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5129957/Does-...

I don't know why people hate autocorrect so much. Yes it's annoying. But trying to use a mobile "keyboard" without it is far more annoying. For every word it gets wrong, it gets 10 more right. Maybe more. And saves me a ton of time on average.

It should definitely be considered part of the input process. Certain kinds of mobile keyboads, like the swyping based ones, and the ones on tiny smart watches, would literally be unusable without autocorrect.

If you know how they work, I think they are pretty elegant. Taking a probability distribution over all the letters you could have been aiming for and missed, and all the words you could have been trying to type, and the probability of each in that context.

I've taken to calling it autoincorrect. The prediction model for phone text seems to only consider word frequencies and blindly replace "were" with "we're" or its with "it's" every time it is encountered without regard for grammatical context. It's incredibly frustrating to type the correct word only to have it mangled by an algorithm that is less sophisticated than MS Word 95.

Thank you, saved me having to suggest its "autoincorrect". A thousand times, yes.

Now you appreciate what MS did.

Default autocorrect is only part of the issue. The more important problem is that it doesn't correct medication names to some odd word combination, like fluoxetine -> flu oxen time, but to another medication.

And you can't just not have those names in there by default. They have to be either blacklisted or installed at once, and that list must be updated regularly indefinitely. Adding a few choice medication names means those words become candidates for a number of other 'misspellings', so you need ALL the possible drug names to prevent correction from another (correct) drug to the newly added (incorrect) one.

Of course the dark path behind this is that a drug company can pay keyboard/spell check makers an incentive to autocorrect to their drugs. You typed "Lipitro". Did you mean "Zocor"?

I was recently trying to write HSA into Excel (as in "Health Savings Account"). Unfortunately HSA is auto-corrected to HAS. In Excel there's no way to undo the auto-correct, even if you backspace and retype it re-corrects. Even putting quotes around it in the cell ("HSA") will auto-correct to "HAS".

So now my user experience with Excel is going to Options -> Proofing -> AutoCorrect Options -> [Find HSA on the long list] -> Delete. I took the opportunity to delete them all.

Honestly if this software was written today I don't believe Auto-Correct would be implemented the way it is, it is super lazy with no room for false positives.

If I recall correctly, the secret incantation to suppress auto-correct in MS Office is control+Z right after the correction occurs.

I've worked with Hong Kong stocks a lot in Excel, and the major stock index is the HIS. No, HIS! HIS! Hang Seng Index, HIS! Arghh... You really have to go to the autocorrect options, as you describe, and remove the HSI->HIS rule, until you get a bloody "HSI" into an Excel cell :-)

EDIT: It's actually the Hang Seng Index, not HK Stock Index, but both expansions capture the meaning.

Oh, God. Excel is the bane of my existence. It does all kinds of crazy stuff that baffles me to no end. I'm sure it all makes perfect sense to an Excel expert but for the casual user who only has to use Excel a few times a year it's a battle with the program. Stuff like interpreting plain numbers pasted as "text only" (example 1234) as dates. And you have to pay close attention because it doesn't really tell you "hey I'm changing what you entered."

First thing I do on every new device, computer tablet or phone is disable the stupid autocorrect. I can't understand how it can be the default. Spellcheck and suggestions are fine, autocorrect absolutely not...

The more languages you need to type, the worse it becomes.

I love autocorrect on my phone. I frequently fat finger letters, and my typing on mobile is faster now due to me being able to assume it'll autocorrect for me. My phone isn't a device I would ever use for writing long prose that might have legitimate spelling issues.

On my laptop though--I usually disable the autocorrect and instead limit it to underlining misspellings.

Autocorrect on the iPhone has gotten noticeably worse in the last year or so, often ‘correcting’ words that were spelled correctly to words that make no sense.

> Autocorrection in general is bad

My emphasis. I dispute this. I use Vim and I have set it up to automatically correct common spelling mistakes I make. It's quite useful and I can see no downside to it.

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