Autocomplete: Threat or Menace?

“I’m losing my house.”

A friend of mine sent me this text message when I was on my way to meet her. Fearing the worst, I called her. She told me she had just left her house and was on her way. Her fancy new cellphone’s predictive-text feature had changed “leaving” to “losing”.

This kind of thing seems to happen a lot these days.

6 thoughts on “Autocomplete: Threat or Menace?”

  1. I suppose that if she’d intended the barbarous “I’m exiting my house” it would have come out as “I’m exciting my house”. Or even worse, it would have been left unchanged.

  2. My Brother is a lung doctor. he told me that autocomplete had turned a sentence about a male patient having an alveolar problem into he was having a vulva problem.

  3. That reminds of the old joke. The difference between the uvula and the vulva. One was “Say Ah.” The other was “Ahhhhh !”

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