Apple knows you didn’t mean to write ‘Ducking’

Apple on Monday announced an updated autocorrect feature that aims to more accurately reflect users’ desired word choices, pleasing customers whose attempts at swearing in text have been replaced by “duck” or “ducking” (and freeing innocent waterfowl from their unfortunate association with an obscenity).

“For those times when you just want to type a word to dodge, well, the keyboard will learn that too,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering.

the update was Announced on the first day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, where the company also unveiled its professional vision headphones. The company said the new keyboard features would be available as part of the iOS 17 software package expected to arrive later this year.

Autocorrect will use a type of neural network called a transformer model to recognize the most frequently typed words by iPhone users and offer predictive text, according to Apple. At the heart of AI systems like ChatGPT, transformer models analyze large amounts of text looking for patterns.

“Ducking” had become such a recognizable bug caused by the iPhone’s autocorrect feature that The Wall Street Journal conducted an interview with the feature’s creator, Ken Kocienda, on a duck farm.

That system relied on both a “static dictionary” of common words and proper nouns and a “dynamic dictionary” of words frequently typed by each user, Kocienda said. But it also didn’t correct close misspellings of profanity, she said, with the goal of preventing users from accidentally inserting profanity into their messages.

The update will allow iMessage corrections to better consider the context of a word in a sentence, said Yulan He, a professor of natural language processing at King’s College London, whose given name is usually changed in iMessage to “Tulane.”

Previously, autocorrect checked the spelling of each word, in isolation, against words in your dictionaries. “Now when they replace a word, they make sure that the replaced word keeps the original meaning of the sentence,” said Professor He. “That’s kind of a key difference.”

AutoCorrect, which was developed in the 1980s to accompany word processing programs, has been creating problems during the time you have been solving them.

In 2014, Naomi Campbell congratulated “malaria” about winning the Nobel Peace Prize. (She might have meant Malala.) According cabling, Goldman Sachs employees were upset that Microsoft Word corrected their company name to incorporate profanity. The phrase “autocorrect made me do it” has become a way of explaining embarrassing substitutions like “sex” for “sec”.

Jillian Madison, who curated a website from autocorrect errors, released the book “Damn, Autocorrect!” in 2011. “If you say, you know, ‘I’m going to run to pick up the kids,’ it often becomes ‘I’m going to run to pick up the LSD,'” she said. told NPR.

In Apple’s presentation, Mr. Federighi said the new system would make autocorrect “more accurate than ever.” The update will also allow users to tap on an autocorrect word to revert it back to what they typed.