Autocorrect

[lordofthereef]

So I am some, what I would consider, peculiar occurrences with autocorrect. In short, I will misstype something, often two words without a space, I will get the read squiggly underline marking a misspelled word, but will then have to tap it to get suggestions. Nine times out of ten the first suggestion is the proper suggestion. Why isn't it just automatically just fixing these words over?

 

[Rich Edmonds]

The autocorrect does pick up on some words typed incorrectly and changes them immediately while you continue to type away, but for the words underlined, it's an easy tap away to change the words (just in case you actually wanted to spell a word incorrectly for whatever reason - accidentally combined words most likely wont be automatically 'fixed' for this reason).

 

[lordofthereef]

Yeah I notcied a lot of words would fix themselves, but many of them won't. Incorrect spelling that sit underlined in red aren't even common slang spelling. It's the difference of tapping a "T" instead of a "Y", or in my previous example, simply missing the space bar. I guess what I am saying is if this is intentional, I hate it. I tend to spend far more time tapping the underlined words to fix them than I ever did on those other OS's.

 

[fwaits]

Maybe a context issue? It isn't able to identify the word fitting the context of the sentence so it simply flags it for your attention rather than auto-correcting. Not sure. Also doesn't the WP keyboard "learn" over time as you use it more?

 

[blehblehbleh]

Maybe a context issue? It isn't able to identify the word fitting the context of the sentence so it simply flags it for your attention rather than auto-correcting. Not sure.

I agree that this could possibly be the reason. MS devs no doubt could employ some kind of prediction or correction algorithm to separate out words that are typed out as one word, but then you run into the problem of the "real world". Who's to say the user didn't mean to type things out that way? At the same time I bet there would be a scenario where it would separate a word that's typed as a whole into two separate words even if there were a word dictionary of common whole words it referenced. Either way it seems like MS would end up pissing someone off. So maybe they thought the best thing to do is to punt it to the user because the user knows the context 100%.

Though now with the learning of most used words in WP8 I'd imagine this might get reduced a bit.

So I guess give it time and maybe you'll be doing less of the correcting yourself.

ref: Auto Correct This! - NYTimes.com

 

[manicottiK]

Confidence level: When typing, often one autocorrect suggestion will be shown in bold -- this is one that will get substituted automatically when you press the space key to start the next work. Sometimes, none of the words is in bold -- in these cases, the software isn't confident that you meant any of its suggestions and it continues offering them to you, but doesn't make the substitution on its own. Maybe the popularity of DamnYouAutoCorrect.com led Microsoft to realize that not all suggestions are valid...