When Your iPhone Finishes Your Sentences
I personally find the word-completion tool kind of annoying on the iPhone – especially as a doc. The software is geared towards choosing the most common word after a few letters, and you can bet that physicians are not typing out common words. Like “emycin” is not “empty” – I’m just sayin’.
A couple of awkward ones recently – my friend was texting me about a tragic and unexpected event and I responded with “Geeze!” which (as I pressed send) turned into “Geese!” That one was hard to explain, and quite insensitive at the time. Err…
Another friend of mine was dealing with a sick kitty at home. She had taken the cat to the vet because she’d stopped eating/going to the litter box. The kitty was diagnosed with an infection and was on the road to recovery, when a couple days later she had her first bowel movement. So my friend decided to text her husband the good news via her iPhone. She typed “the cat went poo,” but alas, the iPhone had the last word. Her husband received this alarming, if not perplexing text message:
“the cat went pop”
Have you had similar iPhone drama? Do share…
Yyou can turn off auto-correction at:
Settings>General>Keyboard>Auto-Correction
If you would rather leave the feature on but spell the word your own way then finish spelling the word and then type the letter x to dismiss the suggestion before typing anything else. Each time you reject a suggestion for the same word, iPhone becomes more likely to accept your word.
I have had similar issues esp receiving texts and I answer without putting on my glasses so the texts end up as gobbledygook. Reading them back in the morning is embarrassing.
Thanks for the reminder of this post:
You know, when you search for X, and it says “Did you mean Y?” where Y is stereotypical? In this case, I searched for “health seeking gss men” (GSS: General Social Survey) . I got “Did you mean health seeking gay men?”
http://www.differenceblog.com/2008/01/health-information-pt-2-sources-for-men.html
But your examples are much funnier.
I shared the popping cat story with my family and they thought it was hilarious. Thanks!
Along those lines, there’s a short and funny skit on phone auto-correction called “Predictive Text Swearing” at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hcoT6yxFoU
I also have a personal iPhone tale, but it’s less a case of what the iPhone can do to me, and more of what I can do to the iPhone. I call it “Putting the P in iPhone”, and posted it at:
http://nottotallyrad.blogspot.com/2009/02/putting-p-in-iphone.html