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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Why people use autocorrect is beyond me. Chats with my friends are littered with addenda where they correct what autocorrect corrected, it's insane. Just type what you mean to type -- a spelling mistake isn't the end of the world.

But changing a word for another makes a sentence unintelligible and blocks or at least seriously slows down communication.

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I touchtype at around 90WPM on a keyboard and swipe/glide typing (which obviously relies heavily on autocorrect) is the only thing that makes inputting text on a smartphone somewhat almost bearable for me. Otherwise I feel like I'm trying to type with mittens while drunk.

It's reasonably fast, I don't have to aim for tiny boxes with my fat fingers and it takes care of accents when I type in french. The correction algorithm is also getting better (albeit still far from perfect); sometimes it'll correct the previous word based on what I enter next. If you want me to disable this you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement.

> you'll have to give me a full size keyboard as a replacement

It seems to me, speed is only an issue for long texts, and why would people type long texts (or lots of small ones) on a phone? Can't that wait until they're in front of a proper computer?

> If you want me to disable this

I don't want you, or anyone, to do anything ;-)

I simply find it strange that people rely on autocorrect, and then send a second message immediately afterwards, to say correctly what autocorrect got wrong. It seems it would be faster, and better, to get it right the first time than the current sequence of "type, send, proofread, retype, resend".

That’s not really the current sequence though. That only rarely happens to me. Autocorrect is probably good for me actually.

Even writing a ~100 char text manually on a phone is extremely frustrating for me. And well, sometimes you try to be fast and you hit "send" before you take the time to proofread correctly.

> Chats with my friends are littered with addenda where they correct what autocorrect corrected

Survivorship bias: You cannot see the (usually much larger) number of words that were correctly autocorrected.

I don't think that it what he is saying. I agree with him and the point is that a misspelled word is not going to inhibit the communication between two friends. Changing a joke/inside/slang word to something the phone thinks is "correct" does inhibit communication. They are arguing that auto correct is worse in this context. (Although, it makes more sense in an email or document editing setting)

This is ignoring the fact that autocorrect can fix massively incorrect words. If you’re off by half a centimeter for a while word it could be complete gibberish if not for autocorrect.

An incorrectly autocorrected word is far worse in terms of negative user experience than a misspelled word not autocorrected. I say underline the word in red and leave it to the user to tap the underlined words to trigger autocorrect.

I can't speak for Apple keyboard but the only Android app I ever bought is SwiftKey (before it became free). Recent versions of Gboard are also pretty good it seems.

Auto-correct mishaps happen (especially when using multiple languages at the same time) but are fairly rare. It's a trade-off, it makes the majority of my typing much quicker and accurate, but I have to be careful about a few things.

Edit: as a non-native speaker, I don't really make spelling mistakes in English, either I know a word or I don't, so that's not a reason for me to use auto-correct.

I have learned to type much faster with autocorrect by working with it and understanding the limitations. I'm not a very good speller, but as long as I get enough letters correct, the phone will do the rest. And for long words I often skip a few letters, because I just need to be close enough.

I use autocorrect because it lets me type sloppily enough that I would make a lot of spelling mistakes without it, frequently making words unintelligible. Of course, I could type reasonably accurately if I slowed down, but in theory, with autocorrect I can type faster and still end up with the right text most of the time. Yes, miscorrections happen, more often than I'd like, but not enough that avoiding them would be worth even a small speed penalty; virtual keyboards are slow enough as they are.

…On the other hand, my teenage younger sister has always used her phone with autocorrect disabled (just because she doesn't like the capitalization), and she types pretty quickly. Maybe it's just a matter of training yourself with autocorrect off, and eventually you can type accurately while keeping the same speed. But I'm not sure. There's no doubt that training would help, but can it make up the full difference, compared to a user well-trained with autocorrect on? (…And for that matter, if I care about speed so much, shouldn't I switch to a swipe-style keyboard? But that's a separate discussion.)

Anyway, the fundamental problem is that without the tactile feedback of a physical keyboard, it's much easier for your fingers to get misaligned, so the relative positions of the taps might be reasonably correct but the absolute positions are totally messed up. Even though you can see when you make a typo, humans have pretty high latency in responding to visual feedback, and you only get the feedback after the fact (whereas on a physical keyboard you can feel if you're in the wrong place before you've actually pressed down on the key). It seems more efficient to just type the whole word at once, and even if you were misaligned, most of the time autocorrect will figure out what you meant. (Especially if you keep going with the sentence, which can change previous words after they were seemingly finalized. I used to go one word at a time, stopping to correct any word that turned out wrong, but after I learned to trust autocorrect a bit more I realized that some of those corrections were unnecessary. This applies especially to the word "its", which autocorrect likes to change to "it's" but will often change back when appropriate.)

Actually, I make typos on physical keyboards too - which I'd like to think is just a side effect of being a fast typist, though I'm probably less accurate than most - but my impression is that those are more often timing rather than positioning related, and I can often tell they've happened by feel alone, letting me hit option-delete to redo the word immediately without waiting for visual feedback to go through my head...

I find it infuriating that autocorrect constantly subs out correctly spelled words with other words it thinks I meant to type. It would be understandable if their suggestion made more sense contextually than what I typed, but that is frequently not the case. When I start typing "I had" it likes to change it to "I has" as if I'm some kind of a cat meme. Where is that even coming from? I can guarantee it's not coming from analyzing my past typing.

When you dictate to the phone, this happens inevitable. For example I can't get the phone to type "culled", only "called" or "cold". And so on. But these are minor compared to some other issues.

Would be nice to be able to have an escape word and spell the previous word by letters. Or get out into some control sequence :)

Maybe there should be an app for that!

I have used the same keyboard, SwiftKey, for the past couple of years. Whenever I write a new word that is unfamiliar to the keyboard it is saved to a personal dictionary. By now, it knows very well what words I use and the autocorrection rarely fails. It is instead quite handy as it corrects my mistypings when writing quickly.

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