Autocorrect is fantastic, until it gets something wrong. Jane Hoskyn shows you how to teach autocorrect to write perfectly on your phone, tablet and PC
Let’s not be too hard on autocorrect. OK, Stuart Andrews was dead right to say it’s infuriating, and you’d be forgiven for viewing it as an arrogant, presumptuous imposition on your phone, tablet and even your PC. But it has come a long way – after all, Word’s spell-checker has been around since people first typed “Arrgh!” and the spell-checker automatically changed it to “Earth!”.
The web is full of entertaining and humiliating examples of wrongly “corrected” words in important texts or emails. One woman recently received 12 bags of flour after texting her boyfriend to ask for flowers, though we’re not sure if that’s really an autocorrect mistake or just a boyfriend with a bad sense of humour. You can find thousands more auto-disasters on the infamous website ‘Damn You, Autocorrect!’ – but be warned, some of them are rather crude.
The point is autocorrect is only infuriating when it gets something wrong. Most of the time, it’s an incredibly useful tool, especially for those of us whose fingers struggle to accommodate the tiny letters on phone keypads. Here we’ll show you how to turn autocorrect into a blessing so good you’ll never even notice it doing its work.
Teach autocorrect to be less stupid
Most tablets and smartphones learn your autocorrect preferences simply by paying attention as you type.
Apple iPhones were the first devices to do this really well. If your iPad or iPhone is about to correct a word as you’re typing it, you’ll see the imminent “correction” in a pop-up. To stop the correction, tap the ‘x’ in the pop-up. To accept it, tap Space and carry on typing.
Do this with misguided suggestions a couple of times, and autocorrect will never bother you with them again, such as suggesting ‘color’ for ‘colour’ or (a personal favourite) suggesting ‘AMD’ – the name of a tech company – for ‘amd’, which is an obvious mis-typing of ‘and’.
You need to do your bit, though. Keep an eye on the screen as you type, and make sure to accept correct changes and reject incorrect ones. If you ignore them or decide to switch the feature off (which is easy to do in your device settings) and correct all your mistakes manually as you type, autocorrect can’t and won’t learn. It’s like doing a child’s homework for them – no-one benefits in the long run.
Android has long had similar ‘smart’ autocorrect functions too, and you’ll also find them built into messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Pushbullet.
Expand your Android’s vocabulary
Android’s ‘Personal dictionary’ tool lets you add words - such as nicknames, slang words or even your postcode - that you want autocorrect to wave through the gate without question.
Tap the Settings icon, scroll down to Personal and then tap ‘Language & input’. We’re using an Android 5 (Lollipop) device, but the process is similar in earlier versions of the operating system. The dictionary applies to all apps that use the default Google Keyboard, which hasn’t changed since Android 4.
Tap ‘Google Keyboard English (UK)’ under ‘Keyboard & input methods’, then tap ‘Text correction’. Here you’ll find loads of useful options (such as ‘Nextword suggestions’) that you can toggle on and off.
Tap ‘Personal dictionary’ at the top and then ‘English (United Kingdom)’ to see a list of all the words you’ve added to your dictionary, if any (Cakes, Weeny and Foxy are cats, in case you were wondering about the screenshot above!). To add a new word, simply tap the ‘+’ symbol and type the word. It is saved automatically.
Turn autocorrect into useful shortcuts
Android’s dictionary also lets you set a shortcut to automatically type any given word or phrase (including those you’ve added). Just type a letter or few in the Shortcut field under the word you’ve entered. Now, when you’re typing in any app that uses Android’s default Google Keyboard, autocorrect will fill in the full word or phrase automatically when you type the shortcut.
It works much the same in iOS. Tap Settings, then Keyboard on the default General screen, and then tap Shortcuts. You’ll find a couple of examples waiting for you, such as ‘omw’, which is autocorrected to read ‘On my way!’ – obviously, you can go much further than that. The process for doing so is similar to Android: tap the ‘+’, type a word or phrase to add it to the dictionary, and then type an optional shortcut.
Go easy on the shortcuts, though. If your postcode starts IG20, for example, and you choose ‘ig’ as the shortcut to type your address in full, your address will suddenly appear every time you start typing any word beginning ‘ig’ – and there are lots of those.
Switch to a more auto-eloquent keyboard
The default keyboards in iOS and Android (Google Keyboard) can be taught to behave better, but there are third-party alternatives that are better at avoiding autocorrect trauma in the first place.
Our favourite is SwiftKey Keyboard, which contains “autocorrect that actually works” and learns your slang and phrases more quickly than built-in tools. We like that you can import your “autocorrect quirks” from online accounts such as Facebook; we’re not so keen on the emphasis on emoji (‘smiley faces’ to you and me).
Swype has more features, but it’s not free (79p for iOS, 59p for Android). However, there’s a free ‘trial’ version for Android.
Hack your iOS Contacts
To make autocorrect ignore a specific word or phrase in iOS, you can either add it to the Shortcuts menu or – usefully in the case of someone’s nickname – add it to your Contacts. Any name, real or otherwise (or indeed any word, including those that autocorrect seems offended by) will then be accepted as correct.
IMPROVE WORD’S SPELL CHECK
Microsoft Word’s ‘Spelling and Grammar’ tools take a slightly different approach to the notion of annoying the hell out of you when you’re typing. Rather than automatically changing any unfamiliar word, it fills your screen with red and green dotted lines to indicate supposedly incorrect spelling and grammar.
As with mobile autocorrect, Microsoft’s dotted lines are annoyingly blunt instruments. The grammar check, especially, fails to take into account the subtleties of the English language and the way we express ourselves informally, and we think it’s best switched off altogether.
The spell check can be useful, and you can set it to autocorrect certain mis-spellings and typing mistakes (such as accidental Caps Lock), according to your preferences. There’s plenty of useful information on Microsoft’s website; here’s a good place to start.
YOUR BRAIN: THE ORIGINAL AUTOCORRECT
As satisfying and fun as it may be to point and laugh at autocorrect mistakes, your brain has been doing the same thing since the day you were born. Spellcheckers may be new, because digital keyboards are new, but the concept of autocorrect is hard-wired into all of us, to help us read, navigate and stay safe. That’s why you see faces where there are none, read invisible words because you expect them in context, or see one word where there are two. To cite a famous example, what does the sentence in the triangle to the left say?