Saturday, November 13, 2010

Excuse me for the IPhone Typos

We may have to break our official TOR rule of covering the same subject on consecutive days but see this more as a continuation. In our quest to drop the blackberry(you see how that is going) we are coming across a major issue. The IPhone typing which although not as overwhelming as I originally feared is far from perfect. The issues are mostly related to that predicted typing feature where it gives you an option of a word based on the garble of crap you've thrown onto the screen.
The issue is that this lacks some serious A.I. and my thought is that this is where Google would blow Apple out of the water. Google knows what I want to search for on the internet before I do. The issue with the Apple predictive type thing is that it has no relation to the grammar or context of the sentence and the way to trigger the suggested word is by hitting the space bar which by the way is also the action you use when you finished typing a word and are onto the next one. If it doesn't recognize it at all it stays on the screen with some wiggly line underlying it so it's easy to see what you may have to correct. The issue is if it does recognize something hitting the space bar accepts that work. So if you don't realize the mistake it throws in some completely unrelated word.
So if you mean to type newer but instead type mewer it will think you typed sewer. The issue is that you may not realize there is a typo because when you hit the spacebar after you are done it assumes you meant sewer. I don't blame them for thinking you may have meant newer but the issue is that as you type you hit the space bar which triggers the 'sewer' correction. Unless you are staring at the screen there's no way to see that there was a mistake and you send out an email which sounds like it was written while also flying a fighter jet through a war zone.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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