The autocorrect on our phone has been responsible for many adventures in texting and chatting lives. On several occasions, it made us sound more intelligent than we actually were, offered the right words when needed and even helped correct embarrassing typos.
And then there are times when it brought upon you shame and embarrassment. Remember the time this happened?
Or the time you posted something like this in your family group message and the entire clan went up in arms against you?
Or the time autocorrect made shopping sooo very difficult for you?
Well, no more!
Apple has filed a patent for a feature that will warn the recipient when a text has been replaced by the system.
The patent says “The replacement character string is visually distinguished within the transcript from one or more other character strings in the transcript.”
English translation: it will highlight the auto-corrected text.
This screen grab from the patent file shows how the system might work. The message was obviously supposed to say “Bring lunch” instead of “being lunch”. Autocorrect will recognize that and change “being” into “bring”.
However, when Mr. Chuck Dickens receives this text, he’ll have the word “bring” highlighted, and tapping on it will most likely show the original text.
Please note that this is still a patent and we have no clue when it might become a usable feature in our phone. Not anytime soon, we’re guessing, so don’t be hopeful of this feature taking center stage in the upcoming WWDC 2016!
Coming back to the present, Apple is already using a highlighting feature in its messages. Have you noticed that while using dictation in iOS, some words get underlined in blue?
Well, those are the words that iOS is not a hundred percent sure of. It inserts them based on the contextual references it draws from the rest of the sentence. Generally, the guesses are accurate, but just to be 100% sure, it will highlight the word so that you can change it if you want.
Small things like this might not matter to a vast majority of people. Yet, they are essential to preserving the overall smoothness of the user experience. Besides, it’s heartening to see that Apple has not forgotten to pay attention to smaller detail — a virtue that made Apple what it is today!