Featured Image Credit: Apple
Auto correct. It is undoubtedly a very useful tool for catching reversed or missed letters.
Usually, Apple’s software is pretty good at guessing what it was you want to say. However, every iPhone user knows the pain of trying to type one thing, and iOS changing it to something else.
Apple users have noticed that one particular word seems to repeatedly trip up the autocorrect software. No matter how many times they fix it, iOS insists on changing it back to the wrong word, often causing confusion for the recipient of the message and frustration on the part of the sender.
The worst part? Its a very common and perfectly safe-for-work four letter word of the English language. Yet Apple software, for some reason, cannot wrap its head around it.
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Users took to Reddit to vent their frustrations. One user begin by posting the start of a message saying “I gave,” with the autocorrect already poised to ‘correct’ the word to ‘have’ instead. Thus altering the meaning of the message entirely. “I Thought iOS 17 was meant to fix stuff like this?” the user wrote underneath.
Many users expressed their sympathy and shared similar issues with autocorrect wrongly replacing words. In particular, users in countries such as France or the Netherlands who regularly need to switch languages for international communication were annoyed that their iPhone refuses to recognize common French words such as ‘Je’. In that case, the software automatically alters it to say ‘Jeremy’ instead.
Some posters had more practical advice, suggesting that anyone experiencing this type of problem attempt to reset the internal keyboard dictionary.
This is done by going to the Settings menu and navigating to the Transfer or Reset Phone option. From there, select Reset and then Reset Keyboard Dictionary.
Others suggested deleted the default Apple dictionary and instead using a third-party dictionary such as the Oxford English Dictionary.
An alternative, and more extreme, suggestions, was to disable autocorrect altogether, as one user put it: “Nowadays, I’ve found it’s better to just switch off autocorrect completely & type normally. A few typos are easily understood by humans and can be corrected with less effort than continuously correcting autocorrect.”
Autocorrect is still a useful tool under normal circumstances, but still, many users would be happier if Apple gave its users a bit more control over how it functions.
