- The technology you created
has linked this poor creature
(gentle pensive music)
to a certain obscenity,
what do you have to say to it?
- I'm very, very sorry.
I never meant it
but it's all my ducking fault.
- Those of us who sometimes get the word duck
instead of a certain similar sounding curse word
on our iPhones,
can blame this guy.
- My name is Ken Kocienda,
and I invented autocorrect for the iPhone.
- Oh yes, I really came all the way out to this farm
(music)
and teamed up with these adorable guys
to bash on autocorrect.
Of course, Dr. Ellen Crain,
the owner of the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary,
has been here too
to ensure that these rescued ducks are happy, healthy,
and definitely not hungry.
Okay, fine.
I really came out here to answer two questions:
why in certain situations
does Apple software autocorrect something
when you clearly meant to type something else,
and number two,
has Apple software gotten worse with time?
That's why I track down Ken.
He spent 15 years working in Apple
and even wrote a book about his experience
of working on the iPhone.
So I ran him and some other experts
through some recent autocorrect fails,
to find out what the duck is going on.
Fail number one, random word changes.
- I was gonna try to write software
that looked at what people did
and changed the letters out from under them.
And so when I did that,
I wanted to be as sure as I could be
that I was giving them what they wanted,
not some ridiculous result that they didn't want.
- But that's not how it always works anymore.
Let's take one of my recent examples to explain.
I use a tool at work called NewsGrid,
but autocorrect always changes it to newsgirl.
As you type, the autocorrect algorithms
try to figure out what you mean
by looking at various things,
including where your fingers hit the keys
and other words in the sentence,
all the while it's comparing your words
to the words in its dictionaries.
- System that I built
actually has two dictionaries in it.
The product shipped with what I called a static dictionary,
you know, a standard dictionary.
It would include all common words
and it would gonna include things like names for products
and sports teams.
- [Joanna] Then there was a second dictionary.
- I called it a dynamic dictionary,
and it was just this running list of your words
and your custom words.
The purpose of it was to try to help you type words
that were in your own personal vocabulary,
words that were different
than words from standard English.
- [Joanna] So in the case of NewsGrid,
the system is going to the static dictionary
and replacing it with a word it knows, newsgirl,
but it really needs to add NewsGrid
to the dynamic dictionary.
This explains other issues
like when autocorrect changes a word
to the name of someone in your address book,
or the name of an app on your phone.
All of that info is part of your dynamic dictionary.
- And so then from that point forward,
the static dictionary and the dynamic dictionary
would be kind of in a little bit of a battle
with each other,
and it was the ultimate job of the autocorrection software
to break ties.
- [Joanna] After you type a word more than two times,
the system is designed to learn that word
and stopped correcting it any further.
With NewsGrid,
that hasn't exactly happened.
Apple said different capitalization
could impact that.
But here's how you can fix an error like that for good,
go to Settings, General,
Keyboard, Text Replacements
and add the word you want
to the Phrase and Shortcuts fields.
Now, when you type this word,
autocorrect should respect your typing.
Fail number two, no bad words.
This is a duck in spilled water on my keyboard.
I certainly did not have this image in mind
when I sent it to a friend a few months ago.
Of course I wanted to say...
(keypad clicking)
Here's why that happens.
- I promise you,
on the original iPhone,
that if you typed a certain four letter word
that begins with F,
if you typed it exactly,
the keyboard would leave it alone,
so you could have your curses.
But if you missed one of those letters,
it wasn't going to correct to the curse word.
- [Joanna] Apple did that
because it didn't want you to ever mistakenly type
a curse word or slur,
or another inappropriate word.
- And so I had to do a study
to go out and find all the terrible things
that people would say
and actually put them in the static dictionary
but with a special mark on them
to say never help anybody type these words.
If they type them exactly, okay,
but if they make a mistake,
don't use autocorrect to nudge somebody
towards saying something awful.
- So what can you do about this?
Well, you can type your bad words correctly.
Somebody get this bug.
You can also add those words to that dictionary
or your contacts list.
Bye, bye, ducks.
Fail number three, grammatical errors.
I ran Ken through a couple of recent ones I've seen.
Sometimes I'll type W-E-L-L, well
but it becomes we'll, W-E-apostrophe L-L.
- Well and we'll is particularly challenging
because both of those are really common words.
My decision back then
was you needed to type the apostrophe
in order to get we'll.
- [Joanna] Sometimes the system changes in to on,
or they're just strange suggestions like and's.
Over time, the system can build
became more sophisticated and aggressive,
correcting words based on the previous words in a sentence.
Complex machine learning
based on what people have been typing on the internet
gave the system lots of new data
on what people might be trying to type.
In iOS 15,
it's now learning from what users type on their iPhones,
though it's all designed in a privacy respecting way.
- It's an interesting challenge because a lot of times,
words, new words come into the language.
You know, with the idea that you're going to train
a, you know, essentially a web crawler
to go out and look at the words that people are typing,
typos are gonna get into the system,
and so how do you get them out?
Well, it's probably a process
that humans are gonna have to go after the fact
and clean those things up.
- So what can you do?
One option, not use Apple's keyboard at all.
You can download a third party option from the App Store,
like Google's Gboard.
One called Typewise is pretty wacky,
but I love that it has an autocorrect undo button
right on the board.
Okay, so has autocorrect actually gotten worse?
Well, it certainly seems like machine learning
has added some more complication to the whole system.
- And so the system has improved a lot
because it's been asked to do more
but therein lies the rub of like features
and software systems on computers, on gadgets.
The more you ask it to do,
the more potential there is for bugs
and unexpected behaviors.
- There may be something to that,
try turning off autocorrect yourself.
I bet the farm that you will quickly realize
how much good work it's doing for you,
despite the occasional duck up.
All right, guys, for the first time,
I am going to send a bunch of messages to people
where I actually mean to say duck or ducking today.