Ducking Autocorrect
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| Figure 1 |
Every teenager has either had a bad experience with autocorrect or seen memes of it on the internet. These mistakes can be funny or detrimental depending on the context. So why do we have autocorrect? Autocorrect started as early as the 1960's because no one has perfect grammar. However even the most complex programs aren't enough to master the complexity of the human language.
Who Made It?
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| Figure 2 |
Not one person came up with the idea of autocorrect just as not one person came up with the idea for a vehicle that can fly. However there are pioneers of autocorrect such as Dean Hachamovitch who is the closet thing to the true creator of autocorrect (Gideon, 2014). It all started when he got angry at making the same mistakes over and over again like saying "teh" instead of "the". He realized that he could put in code into Microsoft word to correct "teh" to "the" after a the space is hit. He went on to put in many more common misspellings into a misspelled words dictionary which scans every word that is typed. If the the word matches then it is changed to the right word. This type of thinking is still used today and users of most autocorrect software can actually add their own common misspellings. So if you say "haga" instead of "haha" on your smartphone like I do, You can add "haga" to your dictionary and make it change to "haha". However, some people use this for mischievous reasons as seen in figure 2 when a teenager changed the word "no" to say different things on his parent's phones.
Evolution of Autocorrect
Through the years, Autocorrect software has made significant improvements. This doesn't just mean that people added more common word misspellings. Autocorrect software is now smart enough to learn the users common spelling errors, use key placement to better correct words, find grammatical errors, and even change suggestions based on memory. Apple is now improving there autocorrect software with this memory system which is called LSTM (long short-term memory). This learns from what you type in the past and applies it to what you are typing at the moment. So if you have been talking about camping for the past few days. You can expect to see "camp" come up as a suggestion after you type "I want to c". The grammatical side of autocorrect is also very useful for things like catching the right use of "there", "their", and "they're" which people seem to misuse all the time anyways. However, grammar corrector software finds mistakes about 50% of the time which isn't bad... or is it?
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| Figure 3 |
Learning
Almost all of us have found ourselves in the situation where you're writing an essay (physically) and you have to change a whole sentence to avoid misspelling a word (figure 3). The claim for many is that Autocorrect software interferes with out ability to memorize or retain spellings of words. It is thought that autocorrect leads to it's users become lazy with spelling therefore not making them care about how to spell believe because autocorrect will fix it for them. Many of us are guilty of this. I know for a fact that I have trouble spelling simple words like "believe" or "Interested". However, some people believe that autocorrect is beneficial to learning because It repeatedly tells the user the correct way to spell a word.
Privacy
As I discussed earlier, LSTM has been rising in the autocorrect industry. This concept works by basically monitoring everything you do to know that you might be talking about that big camping trip this weekend. This could be misused to market camping gear to you instead of just suggesting more camping related items than usual. Who knows how autocorrect will respect privacy in the future. It might soon even gain access to our microphones to hear what we are talking about.
References
Apple. (2016, June). WWDC 2016 Keynote [Video File].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jXg_NNiCA.
Gideon, L. (2014, July
22). The fasinating… fascinating history of autocorrect. Wired.
Retrieved
from http://www.wired.com/
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