Whether 'tis better on the screen to suffer the ridiculous ‘fixes’ of auto-correct, or to turn it off and by opposing auto-correct, fat-finger and mangle words all by myself?
I finally got sick enough of auto-correct’s helpful ‘fixes’ of what I’m trying to type that are ridiculously off the mark, to turn it off. But now I’m finding that I really fat-finger and mess up a LOT without it, especially on my phone, where it’s really easy to hit the wrong letter. Also, I do the miss the way A-C would automatically capitalize ‘I’ and add apostrophes for me. So I am grudgingly thinking of turning it back on.
I used to switch off auto-correct, but then I started to learn French with Duolingo on my phone. It’s just a hassle to type accented letters on a phone, and for French auto-correct is a convenient way to let the phone handle this, so I enabled it again. The fact that I switch between three different languages, German, English and French, is handled very well and almost never confuses the auto-correct algorithm, which positively surprised me.
Absolutely yes on my phone and iPad. It’s way too easy to fat finger things on a touch screen. And I agree with others about accented languages: when typing Portuguese it’s very convenient to have it provide the correct accents.
On a desktop computer with a real keyboard while typing my native language? Nope–that’s when autocorrect does little more than fight me at every step.
It is particularly annoying when it autocorrects search terms that are not proper words. Imagine I’m searching Amazon for “Horq” brand cat food, and it keeps turning that to “hork”. That’s the kind of annoyance I would happily do without.
I never use auto-correct as my daily parlance involves some more esoteric words, which auto-correct “corrects” to words that make no sense in the context of the conversation. I much prefer to have the keyboard show me a list of potential auto-correct suggestions, and in the rare case that I do make a mistake, I will select the suggestion manually.
To me, the actual solution would not be disabling autocorrect, but improving it. The main principle I think it needs is this: It needs to mark what it’s changed for easy proofreading. I envision different underline colors. You keep red for words it doesn’t recognize but couldn’t correct. You use blue for things it didn’t think were words and autocorrected. And you have green for situations where it thinks you may have typed the wrong word.
Oh, and it understands that I’m never going to were and want we’re or its and want it’s. And it won’t autocorrect wont to won’t or cant to can’t. It just makes it easy for me to type the apostrophe myself instead having it on front keyboard. Maybe it is a double for the apostrophe, so I type we,re and get we’re.
I also want the keyboard to try and learn how you press the keys, where you tend to press them, and not just autocorrect based on what letters come out.
If you can’t tell, I’ve actually thought about this a lot while I sit there and reread everything I type more than once, just to know for sure that autocorrect didn’t screw me over.
I just wish I had the knowledge and gumption to actually make such keyboard software.
IMO …
Autocorrect on a phone is worse than useless. It too easily learns my typos as correct words and it changes words unfamiliar to it into something utterly different unnoticed by me.
