Autocorrect gets the blame whenever a text message goes wrong, but we only notice it when it fails. Most of the time, it quietly fixes typos, completes words, and saves you from sending nonsense, so it deserves more credit than it gets.
Whenever we send a text with a wrong word in it, we are quick to blame autocorrect. Good night easily becomes good might, and Santa suddenly turns into a very different figure in red, one with horns.
For longer texts, emails, important assignments, or your resume, you can use a full spell checker, such as the Spell Checker, to check your writing before you send it. Quick chat messages and short email replies from your phone, however, rarely if ever get that treatment. This is where autocorrect comes into play.
After some more or less careful typing, we hit send, just in time to see that jump has become dump.
Inevitably, our frustration rises, and (to ourselves, or in a hastily typed follow-up) we blame the only villain we can accuse of these word crimes: autocorrect.
Stand up for autocorrect
If you think about it, blaming autocorrect is an easy way out, especially since we only talk about it when it fails us. When kissing suddenly becomes killing, we grit our teeth and growl to ourselves: once again, autocorrect has led to an embarrassing situation. But what about all the times autocorrect helped us out?
This replace-as-you-type feature was developed to fix common spelling mistakes and typos. Autocorrect makes life on your phone easier and saves the time you would otherwise spend going back to correct your messages. Typos are corrected, unfinished words are completed, formatting is applied, and some punctuation is even turned into emoticons. Accidental "shouting" with caps lock is often prevented, too. All of this is done by the poor little autocorrect.
Autocorrect is a small piece of everyday artificial intelligence. It makes your life easier, does its job without complaining, and can even learn. Words it does not know can be saved, so you build up your own library of new words. Word suggestions spare you from typing out long terms: you type the first two letters and pick the right suggestion.
How often do you hear about these good sides of autocorrect, though? Almost never. We take it for granted that the feature does exactly what it should, and we lash out at it as soon as it shows the slightest weakness. How many times has autocorrect saved you from trembling or slippery fingers (because of the cold, or for any other reason)? How many times has it turned a hastily typed text full of nonsense into a clear message for your partner, friend, boss, or parent?
It's not that bad
Despite all its real and supposed flaws, you have to admit that autocorrect is not so bad in the end. It is still a fairly young technology, especially compared with the computer or the internet.
Everyone knows that autocorrect can make a text message misleading or embarrassing. You don't have to go to great lengths to explain what happened when you accidentally send choking instead of cooking. A quick mention of autocorrect, and the person you are writing to gets it.
Besides, autocorrect has made texting a lot more fun, as countless collections of autocorrect fails show, and you can't deny that.
When a text really matters, though, don't leave it to autocorrect alone: autocorrect replaces a typo with a real word, and a real word in the wrong place is exactly the mistake it cannot see. 3 spelling tips that actually help you spell better help you rely on it less.