I Invented the iPhone’s autocorrect. Sorry about that, and you’re welcome

“I have a confection to make. Ugh! No, I don’t want to bake a cake. Let me type that again,” Ken Kocienda writes for Wired. “I have a confession to make. I worked for many years as a software developer at Apple and I invented touchscreen keyboard autocorrection for the original iPhone.”

“I’m proif if rhe wirl… ahem… I’m proud of the work I did to bring software-assisted typing to a smartphone near you. After all, if the iPhone keyboard wasn’t based in software, Apple couldn’t have delivered on Steve Jobs’ vision for a breakthrough touchscreen computer with as few fixed buttons as possible,” Kocienda writes. “The keyboard needed to get out of the way when it wasn’t needed so the rest of the apps on the phone could shine.”

“The iPhone succeeded in this, but I’m also aware that its style of keyboard autocorrection has its limits,” Kocienda writes. “I wrote the code for iPhone autocorrection based on an analysis of the words we type most commonly, the frequency of words relative to others, and the errors we’re most likely to make on a touchscreen keyboard. More than 10 years after the initial release of the iPhone, the state of the art now is much as it was then.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Damn autocorrect!

8 Comments

    1. i had spelling tests every day in school right up until the second half of my senior year of high school, when i guess the nuns just gave up and figured if we couldn’t spell by then we would never be able to spell. i hate, Hate, HATE autocorrect.

Reader Feedback

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.