Day: May 1, 2024

Some of you may be aware that Apple has, over the past few iterations of their IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS, been adding more active predictive text input.

Essentially the various Operating Systems try to guess what you’re about to type based on your usual word choices and learned sentence structures. This can be really cool, and helpful, except when it isn’t.

There are two problems as I see it. The first is that if you’re trying to improve your writing, the automated choices presented tend to make you lazy because it’s easier to choose what’s shown than fight the system. Oh, and the system does tend to get in your face if you change your vocabulary and / or sentence construction.

The second problem is that the embedded dictionaries in these operating systems have gotten sloppy.

For example: If I misspell the word sueing the OS changes the word to seeing, instead of changing the misspelled sueing to suing.

The example above is a fairly common mistake that the internal dictionaries should easily recognize and correct in English. (I recognize that there are other languages in these operating systems and those languages have different rules.)

I however am speaking and writing in English so that’s my personal baseline. In English, there are many instances where the ‘e’ is dropped when adding the ‘ing’, but sometimes that rule doesn’t apply. It’s in those times when the automatic dictionary can be mind bogglingly helpful, or an annoying hinderance.

This is common throughout all the platforms.

It would be easy to dismiss this as nothing, until you stumble over it again and again. If you write a blog, or you’re writing a manuscript it gets annoying fast. We all get bumble fingered if we’re typing fast in a moment of inspiration or if we’re tired and just trying to slog our way to the end of the project or our day.

At these times, when we’re not at our best, the autocorrect systems should be helping us instead of muddying our thoughts by selecting incorrect words based on God only knows what kind of algorithm. 

Microsoft Word induces its own decidedly annoying version of this, with its internal dictionary. I have literally become so confused typing a word in Word that I’ve pulled out a paper dictionary to find the correct spelling. Turns out, the word I was misspelling wasn’t that far off. All I’d done is typed an ‘I’ instead of an ‘e’ and had swapped the ‘I’ position in the word. It should have been the 8th character and I put it in the 9th position.

Word not only couldn’t comprehend what I’d done, Word couldn’t present me with any alternative spelling at all.

Since I know that sometimes I’ll use an ‘I” instead of an ‘e’ I tried both. Word stubbornly refused to show me possible alternative spellings, opting to steadfastly highlight the word as misspelled. 

Even when I erased the word and typed it letter by letter from the dictionary into the document, Word highlighted the now correct word as incorrect, after a few moments Word decided to remove the little red squiggle.

Ahem! 

It’s times like these that I speak harshly to my computer because it’s adding to my confusion seemingly on purpose.

I shouldn’t speak harshly to my computer, I should be yelling at Microsoft! It’s their 1 gigabyte bloated program that can’t seem to get out of its own way.

I remember when Word existed on a single floppy disk and worked pretty reliably. Now, I find that I don’t enjoy working with it as much as I once did. These days, it’s slow and ponderous and while I have a very fast computer, Word sucks up a lot of resources.

I’m tending toward lighter faster programs for text processing and only using Word when absolutely necessary.

I suppose the bottom line here is I expect better.

The next version of IOS, iPadOS, and Mac OS is likely to add some kind of AI component running on the devices.

I am not looking forward to this ‘Improvement’. It seems to me, if these software behemoths can’t do simple things like providing useful dictionaries perhaps installing AI software on our devices isn’t a great idea.