Autocorrect

Remember Autocorrect, the feature that corrects your errors as you type along? Sure, it often makes funny mistakes while correcting you (hence sites like Damn You Autocorrect!), but all in all a very useful thing.

Gideon Lewis-Kraus wrote this article on the history of autocorrect and points out that autocorrect was a necessary condition for the success of the touchscreen:

“The whole notion of touchscreen typing, where our podgy physical fingers are expected to land with precision on tiny virtual keys, is viable only when we have some serious software to tidy up after us.”

Kind of ironical that a feature that Microsoft came up with for MS Word became the foundation on which Apple built its empire!

Once it started developing autocorrect, Microsoft realized it had to expand the standard dictionary…a lot. So it asked one its interns, Christopher Thorpe, to write a script that compiled all the manual entries that Microsoft employees had made to their custom dictionaries. Fast forward to present day:

“The work of the autocorrect team has been made algorithmic and outsourced to the cloud.”

Some of the Microsoft autocorrect errors went on to become words with new meanings! Like the word “co-operation”, when misspelled, got changed to “Cupertino”. This happened so many times among European bureaucrats that it wasn’t all that uncommon to hear about someone who wanted “for increased Cupertino between nations”! And hence the word “cupertino” now means trapdoors that got assimilated into the language. Lewis-Kraus points out how unintentionally prophetic that became:

“It's almost too good that the foundational autocorrect mistake, the one that gave the whole genre its name, was the unsolicited appearance of Cupertino, home of Apple's headquarters—since in the past seven years it's been Cupertino, not Redmond (home of Microsoft), that has elevated autocorrect to its role as a kind of necessary arch-demon.”

Autocorrect has led to American English dominating the world. As one reader, Chris Nicolatos, pointed out, “The most annoying autocorrect is when you type British English and you automatically get the Americanised version coming up”.

Other comments on the article were the inevitable ideological battles. Matthew Burr said people who faced the problem of trying to land their “podgy physical fingers…on tiny virtual keys” must be iPhone users! To which Kyron responded, “Weird, I thought android had copied a virtual keyboard, too”.

Poor Microsoft. Even for features they invented, Apple and Google manage to enter the conversation, have the final say and even take it to the next level: autocomplete!