It could be a lot worse. For a while there, there was a line of Xerox photocopiers that was autocorrecting numbers. Yes, a photocopier. Apparently, it was (first of all) compressing the scanned images before printing them, (second) using a lossy compression algorithm, and (third) specifically a compression algorithm that replaced parts of the image with other, similar-looking parts of the same image. I’m amazed the company wasn’t sued into oblivion over that one.
A friend told me the story of how her mother tried to give her a piece of original artwork she really did not want. It would take great tact, restraint, and avoidance of discussion to turn it down without hurting her mother’s feelings. So instead of telling her mother face-to-face that she didn’t want it, my friend tried to send a delicately worded text message that began “thank you for your offering.”
Somehow, the mobile phone’s autocorrect decided that “your offering” was supposed to be, “dad’s farting.” So she wrote to her mother “Thank you for dad’s farting, but…”
Her mother doesn’t use or understand modern technology much, couldn’t make head or tails of the “but mom, it was auto correct!” explanation since she had no idea what auto-correct is, and was totally indignant and confused. Trying to explain to her mother why she’d supposedly written about her father’s farts ended up being more exhausting than directly turning down the artwork would have been.
Moral: never, ever hit “send” without reading your text first, and if you don’t want your mom’s painting, just say so.
Some years ago, a Doper told a story of a church-sponsored poetry contest. The winning poem contained the phrase, “God will hold you in His loving arms.”
On the way to publication, someone misspelled “arms”. The computer looked for a four-letter word, beginning with “A” and ending with “S”, and decided that “anus” must be the correct word.
“The secret to a good life is Happiness in Your Household”
Say that with a thick French-Canadian accent and see what you get.
The CIO of the company I worked for during the mainframe programmer portion of my diverse work experience had a name that the spellcheck always wanted to make “Nipples.”
One relatively simple, but very important, project I worked on as a junior programmer saw me in his office, along with my manager and VP. One of the business users emailed as I was starting and tried to tweak the project in a way that would have been career limiting. I replied trying to politely point out just why that change to the specs would have huge unintended consequences on a company priority. There was a little bit of name dropping to make sure they knew just how constrained I was.
What I almost sent, thanks to spell check, included the phrase, “has visibility at the nipples level.” :smack:
Sounds like the Trump settings to me!
This happens all the time when Google attempts to search Google Books with optical character recognition scanning.
Results of Googling the phrase “her in his anus”. Total snickerfest.
My high school’s newspaper once ended up with a headline about the annual Breakfast with Satan :smack:. Another addition somehow ended up with an article about the school cocktower ;).
Not sure what that has to do with spellcheck failures, but it made me laugh. 
During a difficult return from Europe to Philadelphia (two flight changes, with a connection in Montreal instead of JFK), I needed to send this text message to the person planning to meet me at the Philadelphia airport:
Arriving PHL 19:45
My phone decided that “PHL” should be “Pho”. I caught this, fought with it for a short while, and finally removed “PHL” in favor of “Philadelphia airport”; this, it was willing to send.
Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the fact that it had also changed “Arriving” to “Arrived”. This got sorted out via a couple of further text messages.
The thought occurred to me: How is that sort of “help” from a (so-called) smartphone distinguishable from the actions of a malicious virus?
Autocorrect is turn-off-able, right? I don’t understand why anybody wants it enabled.
is this auto-correct fails or ‘prediction’ that is failing - I can see a mixture here.
My cellphone will ‘predict’ what it thinks I want to type - and while that is akin to auto-correct - it is a little different and requires paying close attention while typing that it deosn’t finish word 1 and move on to word 2 when its reallyoneword.
A sound editor will. It’s an industry term for dropping the volume of the background music track whenever the narrator speaks.
If I say “oops” to my iphone, it transcribes it as “boobs”. Every time. Just me?
I’ve done a fair amount of work in the sound engineering field and can agree with this.
Could be a lot funnier in reverse
“I’m ****ing the singer now”
“You’re what?”
There are also mixers and digital audio workstation plugins that perform “automatic ducking.” Which is probably a type of porn.
“Can’t talk, I’m ducking my boss.” “Correcting” that leads to an entirely different meaning.
I was reading a ‘stupid things you believed as a kid’ thread in another forum where a guy told the story that, growing up in England during the early 70s, he thought the Americans were fighting gorillas in the jungle led by an Asian man who could control them named Viet Kong. He was like King Kong but, you know, a general in the jungle gorilla army.
MAD Magazine #93, March 1965:
My agency once eulogized one of its leaders for his “decades of public service.”
Only the press release left out the L.
I’m not kidding, that long-standing nightmare of government copywriters actually happened to us.