From a Scottish woman wanting the right words on a birthday cake to U.S. presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, autocorrect doesn’t have many fans. Even though the feature started off with the best intentions — to automatically correct misspelled words you type with your smartphone — it has also led to hilarious, and sometimes offensive, fails. With its recently granted patent, Apple hopes to be the autocorrect saving grace people need.
Normally, iOS underlines a misspelled word with a red line, in the hopes of making you aware of it. With the patent, iOS would also be able to underline an autocorrected word with a blue line, which, in theory, would make people pay attention to the words being autocorrected. Interestingly, the recipient would also be able to see that words had been changed, but wouldn’t be able to see the original words. This differs from the current feature baked into iOS, which doesn’t highlight misspelled words for recipients.
Even so, such a feature is likely to be attractive for the meticulous typists among us, as well as for the faster typists. And the faster typists need all the help they can get, since it’s because people type so fast that they often ignore how words are spelled out, which is what leads to these autocorrect fails occurring in the first place.
Apple’s granted patent caps off a strange week for the company, which started out with a report of the company’s first year-over-year revenue decline in 13 years. Things continued downhill from there, as 25-year-old Apple employee Edward Mackowiak was found dead in one of the company’s conference rooms in its Cupertino, California headquarters. The Santa Clara County Medical Examiner officially ruled the death a suicide, with no evidence of foul play or other employees’ involvement.
