There’s nothing more untimely than typing out an impassioned speech only to see autocorrect has changed your carefully chosen words into “duck” and “ducking.” Sure, it could bring a laugh in a tense situation. However, the gulf between the word you probably intended and “duck” is most likely large. Telling jokes is not really autocorrect’s purpose. While it may feel like Apple’s autocorrect is there to sanitize your speech, Apple sees the issue. The company will finally make sure the word “duck” will only appear when you’re alluding to the charming animal. If your intention is to swear, Apple’s latest autocorrect update for iPhones and the like will learn that about you and stop bringing out the duck.
Duck yeah, autocorrect! Craig Federighi, the Head of Apple’s Software Engineering, shared this evolution at WWDC 2023. He noted, “In those moments where you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too.” This new version autocorrect will come to Apple’s products as part of the iOS 17 software update coming in September. Autocorrect will now function using artificial intelligence technology. It will better learn a user’s speech patterns, including when they’d like to swear instead of quack. Although, who knows, some of you may have just adopted “ducking” into your daily lives thanks to autocorrect.
In addition to making autocorrect more swear-friendly, the update will add other enhancements to the feature. Autocorrect will also receive “a refreshed design to better support typing, and sentence-level autocorrections can fix more types of grammatical mistakes. Users will now receive predictive text recommendations inline as they type, so adding entire words or completing sentences is as easy as tapping the space bar, making text entry faster than ever.”
Well, duck. We just hope we won’t start to see autocorrect adding swears in when we’re just trying to appreciate wildlife.
