Juha Saarinen: Oh duck off, autocorrupt!

Many of the automatically corrected changes are usually amusing. But the fun wears thin. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

Computers, being black boxes that offer no visible clues by themselves as to what they're doing, depend on good user interfaces for operation.

This is especially true for devices that require you to type on the screen. With only haptic buzzes indicating keystrokes have been registered, accurate and fast touch-typing is nigh impossible, especially on handheld devices.

That's why autocorrect and predictive text exists. Yes I know, there are some amazing two-thumb typists out there, but most of us would just like to fire off finger-pecked messages that don't look like a bad case of dylsexia has struck.

I've been hearing lots of complaints recently that autocorrect and predictive text on Apple iOS devices is, well, autocorrupting what people write.

It can be niggly stuff like turning "well" into "we'll" and "were" to "we're" or vice versa, to irritating changes like changing January 10 to January 1.0. Worse, it can mangle people's names which makes you look disrespectful. Sometimes you actually want to swear too, and the frumpy American bowdlerisation of your strong language is profoundly annoying.

Luckily, many of the automatically corrected changes are usually amusing. Not that anyone believes when you blame autocorrect for the gobbledygook, and it doesn't take long before the fun wears thin.

Apple's yet to explain what's going on, but it seems to have been introduced with the iOS 15 operating system update last year, but it might have started earlier than that.

The problem has not gone unnoticed and there are long threads of complaints and kvetching about it on different social media forums.

Games and app developer and Apple luminary Steve Troughton-Smith blamed Apple's crowdsourced machine learning autocorrect system, which adds suggestions from random users that can be totally bizarre, and typos too.

This is a really interesting idea, to learn what millions of Apple users type and have that improve correction and predictive text, without identifying who wrote what as the words are reconstructed and protected by Differential Privacy.

A flawed machine learning algorithm could be one part of the problem, but respected Apple developer John Gruber also suffered from autocorruption of what he wrote, noting that iOS would change "20" to "2.0" each time.

With the help of his blog readers, Gruber eventually figured out that the problem was caused by an app with "2.0" in its name. The fix? Head to Settings -> General -> Keyboard - Text Replacement on your iPhone and iPad, and add "20" as a phrase and "20" as the shortcut.

This means iOS will prioritise "20" above apps with "2.0" in their names, Gruber wrote.

To me, that's a hacky workaround that points to some flawed logic in Apple's code. To sort out the random weird suggestions that predictive text wants to insert, you can either turn off that feature completely, or reset

You can reset the keyboard dictionary too, but that's a blunderbuss approach that wipes everything that your device has learnt. Apple really needs to prioritise this issue, as it's driving users nuts.

Which I'm sure will happen. I rate Apple's software in general, but they're not perfect. No developers are, unfortunately.

Take the Find My app for example. It's an excellent feature that keeps track of your devices, and lets you play audio, lock and erase them if they're lost or stolen. If you haven't set it up on your Apple device, do it now.

When it loses contact with them, Find My can warn you when you leave a device behind too on your iPhone or Apple Watch, which is again a brilliant feature.

I encountered a stress level increasing Find My quirk recently however, when I was filling up in Wellsford and went into the service station to get some things. Having filled up, I got on State Highway 1 and was soon blemming along at 100km/h for a decent distance when Find My went bing and said I'd left my iPad in Wellsford.

Since I'd packed it in a suitcase and put it in the boot, it didn't seem likely I had left the iPad behind. That said, I forgot to lock the car before going into the service station.

Maybe some Kaipara rogue had noticed that, ignored the CCTV, and nicked my suitcase from the boot?

By Warkworth I couldn't take it anymore. I pulled over, tapped on the Find My notification, and watched as the app updated and said my iPad was in Warkworth, where I had stopped.

I can't tell if Find My not automatically updating and advising that the "lost" device has been found again is intended behaviour, or a bug. It's terrible for neurotic Apple users like yours truly though.

Also, it's yet another reminder that you can only trust technology to a certain extent, and not questioning it could lead to a ducking horror show.