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Notre Dame Stories.

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This is called the Atlatl and it's

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a spear thrower stories of discovery, purpose

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Is an engineering degree something that you're actually called to do? Well, who's calling and how do you even hear it?

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Coming up on Hands on Apple. It's time to fix Autocorrect. Finally, stay tuned.

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This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands on Apple. I am Micah Sargent and today we are taking a look at a very important feature. We've all been there. You type a perfectly normal word and your iPhone decides you meant something else entirely. So you correct it and then it corrects you back and then you correct it again harder this time. Like that's going to help. And then Autocorrect has decided that it is going to correct you again. Autocorrect has been on our devices for almost two decades and it still feels like a coin flip sometimes. But here's the thing, there's actually a lot you can do to make it behave and there's a built in feature sitting right next to it that most people completely ignore. So let's fix both of those today. So first and foremost, we gotta talk about how Autocorrect actually works. You know, before we get into how to improve it, what we need to do to fix it. It helps to understand kind of what's going on under the hood. So what do we need to know about Autocorrect? First and foremost, Autocorrect on your iPhone and your IP as far as we know, uses a combination of a built in dictionary plus your personal typing history. And as of iOS 17, it uses a transformer language model that runs on device. Now that last part is actually a pretty big deal. I remember when it was announced with iOS17 and people were pretty excited. Apple moved from a simpler predictive model to something that's a little bit closer to how these large language models have that we, that we use today. Which is why autocorrect in iOS 17 and later, noticeably better for some anyway at understanding what you meant based on the full sentence, not just the individual words. So instead of just kind of going what's this word? And what comes after, there's a little more context involved Right now on the Mac, Autocorrect does exist, but it does behave a little bit differently depending on the app. So it's most aggressive, most active in apps that use Apple's native text system. So that's going to be Notes, Mail Messages, TextEdit and other apps that go ahead and use the default. But it's going to be less present or perhaps even absent in third party apps that handle their own text input. So is Autocorrect a learning system? Yeah, we talked about that. Your device keeps a local dictionary of the words that you type frequently and that's why Autocorrect does get better over time. It starts to learn your vocabulary that includes names, includes slang abbreviations that you use regularly and kind of holds onto those. Now, this is important. When you reject a correction by tapping on that little X that's in that suggestion bubble that pops, pops up or retyping the word, you're actually training it. So one rejection is a bit of a signal. But if you keep hitting the X and rejecting, rejecting, rejecting, you are saying, this is a big signal. Hey, you got to stop doing this. So one rejection doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to change things, but if you keep telling it no, it's wrong, eventually it's going to stop correcting that word. Now, this learning, and I think this is an important aspect of this, it is per device, it does live locally, so it's not syncing across your devices via icloud. There's another feature that does, and we'll talk about that soon. But that's why autocorrect might behave differently on your iPhone than it does on your iPad. So what can we do to actually make Autocorrect smarter? Well, first and foremost, the most important thing that you can do is when autocorrect suggests something wrong. Don't just backspace and retype what you're doing. Tap that little X on the prediction bubble to actually tell Autocorrect no, you're wrong about this suggestion. This will send a clearer signal to the system and it's just then just kind of going back and overwriting the word. Right. A lot of people, it's been my experience, don't really realize that that little X is doing something more meaningful than deleting and retyping. Also, iOS 17 and later has these gray inline predictions that you can accept by tapping the spacebar. So as you're typ typing, you'll see little bits of text that show up and it will kind of suggest what it wants to you. You hit spacebar to lock it in. These are context aware. Sometimes they're good. So if you've been Ignoring them. If you found them distracting, perhaps you give them a shot. Try it out, see if it's helpful, and you may even find yourself typing significantly less. Now, let's talk about what we do. If autocorrect isn't working for you and it's learned a bunch of garbage, Perhaps it's learned misspellings, a bunch of ins jokes that you regret or that have changed over time, typos that became real words. You can reset your keyboard's dictionary. So the way that you do that we'll head over to iOS to take a look, is we go into Settings, we tap on General, we scroll all the way down to transfer or reset iPhone, we choose reset. And then in this screen, we choose Reset. Keyboard Dictionary. Now, it's important to note that this will completely wipe your personal learned words. You will start fresh and it won't affect what we're going to talk about soon, which are text replacements. But this is an all or nothing choice. You can't just selectively unlearn a single word or kind of go in and look at what the dictionary has learned. No, no, no, no, no. Once it's done, it's done. It's a whole dictionary or nothing. And of course, that can be kind of annoying to have to deal with. Another thing that you want to do is head into Settings, General and keyboard, because here in this page, there are a lot of toggles that you might want to review. First and foremost is character preview. So what happens is as you're typing, a little character will pop up above the key, showing you that you've. That you're what you're typing. Haptic feedback, of course, provides that little bzz as you're typing to sort of give you that feeling, oh, I am typing. And then sound. If you have the sound on your phone, turn on. But let's talk about all of the keyboards. Auto capitalization, as you might imagine, is going to capitalize words based on sentence rules. Autocorrection, if you have that turned off, autocorrection is not going to autocorrect. Predictive text and show predictions in line are two features that are kind of tied together. Predictive text is that little gray bar above any sentence that you're typing. That or rather above the keyboard that has some suggestions, some options for you for what you might type next. Show predictions in line. That's that feature where you hit space bar to select a word. I have it turned off. I like having predictive text, but I don't like it to show up as I'M typing so that's just my choice there. Show math results. That is if you type in different math equations, you're all you are able to see the results there. Check spelling will check your spelling along the way and underline misspelled words. Enable Caps Lock lets you double tap the shift key to all caps. Your keyboard Smart Punctuation takes what are basically the inch and foot markers and some others and turns them into the actual punctuation. So for the case of again inch and foot markers, it will turn those into real typographical quotes and apostrophes. The slide to type option lets you move your thumb along the keyboard or whatever finger you want to use to slide to type. So it's otherwise I'm going to swipe to type delete Slide to type by Word lets you remove word by word by word while you have slide to type on and then one of my favorites, the dot shortcut or the period shortcut. This says if you double tap the space bar it will add a period to the well actually it inserts a period followed by a space. So I type and then I hit space space and then it puts a period at the end of the sentence. So I like to use that. Dictation of course lets you use dictation. We've had an episode on that, so we won't be talking about that today. And auto Punctuation says that while dictation is enabled, it will automatically add punctuation. I have found it annoying and therefore I go in and change it to not do that punctuation automatically because I don't want it to do it. And then lastly, whether you are able to use emoji as stickers, if you can tap and drag an emoji and drop it somewhere like it's a sticker on the Mac, you need to go into system settings, keyboard input sources, and then edit. That is where you will find the autocorrect spelling and capitalization options. Honestly, they are kind of buried a couple layers deep.