What is the deal with how to type your texts?
Sending a text message used to go through the t9 system.
This meant that every letter of the alphabet was assigned to one of the 9 numbers on your phone and spaces were assigned to 0.
But this meant that typing a C would mean 3 clicks on 1 and take a long time to write a word. So the predictive texting was invented.
This meant that the phone would start guessing words as you were typing letters, often leaving the wrong words to show up in your texts.
After the surgence of blackberries, that had a full keyboard, things got easier and this got integrated into touchscreen phones.
Predictive texting got better as AI improved and this gained a continuous improvement wave in texting.
Include speech-to-text, emojis, autocorrect and all and we have gone through a lot of different ways of texting in the past.
How is iOS changing the texting game?
However great all the inventions have been, one of the major flaws has always been autocorrect.
Using AI rules, writing a text tried to avoid curse words, used the most-used words of a large pool of users and started remembering words you would always type to make sure that if you wanted something else, you were corrected.
With the release of iOS 17, autocorrect will become much more intelligent, hopefully and stop messing up your texts.
Predictive texts will go directly to the message line while typing, which Android has been doing for a while and is known to not always be ideal, but gives you a better option than to directly autocorrect.
And that brings us to the second update, the autocorrect will be easily be undone by tapping the word that has been autocorrected to show what you typed.
This will however, not work if you haven’t typed the full word yet and accepted a word as autocorrected.
It should also start to learn your personalized suggestions as mentioned before, with most notably the inclusion of curse words.
What can you do to avoid these texting issues?
The most notable invention since the blackberry, from the t9 experience, has been the inclusion of a keyboard.
Since the invention of the computer, a keyboard has been the easiest way to quickly type and interpret your messages.
There are several keyboard types for different countries (AZERTY, QWERTY most notably), but we all know how to type fast and proper, while the computer can give us suggestions afterwards to check our spelling.
This is why an alternative invention might be a great solution to avoid all these texting issues: Online texting services.
Using your computer you can type with your keyboard, without all the hassles and send your texts safely and securely and even anonymously if you would like to any number around the world.
No more autocorrect, but helpful corrections, no t9 or predictive texts, but simply typing up your own thoughts. And all that in a much speedier manner. We’d love to see the next OS on any phone beat that.