Oh, auto-correct

I received this customer inquiry today;
“Which of the has tunes would fit a polish style am.”
So I did a little translation;
“Which of the gas tubes would fit a polish style AK.”
And translation of the translation;
“Which of your forward optic mounts would fit a Polish style AK?”
Context. It’s all about context– I’m reasonably sure I wasn’t being asked about the appropriateness of certain music for Polish radio stations on the amplitude-modulation band, for example. And so now I can give an informed answer to the question without asking him to clarify.

Share

5 thoughts on “Oh, auto-correct

  1. Fun with technology! Good job of context-based understanding, Lyle. The latest issue of Wired magazine has an article on a promising conversational user interface which will make such puzzles a thing of the past.

    I hope my pharmacist doesn’t use auto-correct…

    Expecting hydrochlorothiazide and getting hydrochloric acid would be upsetting.

  2. I sent a message and my phone changed endodontist to encoding jet, which is not as upsetting as HCl.

  3. Seriously, as I don’t have one of these smart-phones (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) but may be forced to get one in the future, please tell me that there’s a way to turn off this irritating auto-correct “feature”.

    • No problem. You go to the ap store, log in with your Apple ID and Password, give them your credit card information and download the “iDumbPhone” ap for seventy five dollars. Then you set up an iDumbPhone account and pay for a monthly subscription service which keeps your smart phone from doing anything other than making and taking calls and text, and of course automatically downloading frequent security updates to the iDumbPhone system. The iDumbPhone application takes up a ton of resources on your smart phone, so you need to get the latest, most high-end smart phone, plus a high bandwidth data plan for the updates, in order to run it as a dumb phone.

      That, or, yes, you can turn off auto-correct. It is just useful enough (adding the apostrophe to I’m and so on, when doing so on the virtual keyboard takes extra strokes) that I tend to put up with it in spite of it sometimes bizarre interpretations. The key, as always when writing, is to proofread.

Comments are closed.