Sometimes I say bad words. Not in my stories — The Washington Post is a family publication — but in messages to friends, in person, while making coffee, during meetings and anywhere it won’t get me fired. So like many of us, I am familiar with the conservative stance most auto-correct systems have on salty language. Make your technology a force for good. Sign up for The Tech Friend newsletter with Shira Ovide.ArrowRight This week, we look at this issue and other quirks of auto-correct and how to get around them. As always, hit us with your technology questions through our submission form here or at [email protected]. If we can’t solve your problem, at least we can help you curse about it. What questions do you have about the technology in your life? We are still battling with auto-correct: Auto-correct is capitalizing words for no reason. PLEASE tell me why this is happening in random words in the middle of sentences in iMessage. It drives me insane, thanks. Advertisement — Anonymous reader Auto-correct being incorrect is a widely experienced quirk of modern typing technology. Auto-correct is a feature available on Android and Apple smartphones, PCs and applications like Outlook. Its goal is to make typing a little easier by automatically changing words, letters or punctuation it thinks you entered incorrectly. It can, for example, capitalize the first word of a sentence or change “teh” to “the” or “goorgling” to “googling.” But sometimes this feature does things we don’t want it to. In this reader’s case, their iPhone would capitalize words in the middle of a sentence such as And or Front. Sometimes it will change a person’s name to all caps, like you are yelling it, or learn something by mistake and change a real word to nonsense. And of course, it notoriously tries to change bad words to more wholesome ones, like duck.
I am not here to complain about a magical handheld computer’s mostly amazing artificial intelligence. Auto-correct is great; it saves many of our butts regularly and my long-but-clumsy fingers are glad it exists. That said, if you are frustrated with auto-correct, here are some things you can do to try to remedy it. On smartphones, most settings can be found in your keyboard settings.
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