The writer John Kelly recently tweeted:
For those not familiar with the term, here’s a definition of predictive text courtesy of whatis.com: “an input technology that facilitates typing on a mobile device by suggesting words the end user may wish to insert in a text field.” The most useful function, in my experience, is its suggestions once you’ve started writing a word. For example:
I can select going or good by tapping on one of those choices, or I can ignore them and type something else, like generally, which the system will presumably notice and suggest the next time.
To the point of John Kelly’s tweet, predictive text also has an idea of the word you want to type even before you start typing it. For example, in the middle of composing a text message, I can choose (or ignore) any of three options (to, back, or home):
I tried John’s suggestion and came up with this band name: “Ben Yagoda and the British Open.” Other people’s responses to his tweet included “Richard Smyth and the Other One"; “Heather Froelich and the State Department"; “Catherine Cook and the Way Home"; and “Kevin Harradine and the various social media platforms.”
Why did all of us have different band names? As a writer on lifehacker.com explained, “In its most basic form, keyboard prediction uses text that you enter over time to build a custom, local ‘dictionary’ of words and phrases that you’ve typed repeatedly. It then ‘scores’ those words by the probability you’ll use or need it again.” As I learned from the lifehacker article, (which also provides a good explanation of how the application works), there are keyboard apps, such as Swype and SmartKey, that do all sorts of fancy things to come up with better predictions and suggestions. For now, I just have my built-in iOS 11 version.
Band names are one thing. What if I tried to write a whole essay using predictive text? I opened up my mail app and took it for a spin.
Here goes nothing. My plan is to use predictive text and choose one of the three options unless there’s something else I need to say at a particular point.
I believe that the way to be happy is to see what a good person would do. The only problem is that you can’t get a hold of the app for free. Hey there. Aretha is the best singer in the whole world. She has sung to the president and basically all of us.
A new paragraph seems to be an excellent choice now. But what should I say? I think it’s great that we can make a decision on that one. The best thing about this place is the pizza. It’s delicious!
In conclusion, I’m not quite sure how to make a point that is smart at all. I don’t want to go tooken. Wait, why would it possibly suggest “tooken”? All in all, this app is great. The end.
Clearly, I need to up my predictive-text functionality. Often all three choices just seem too simple, and then there’s the occasional truly weird suggestion, such as “tooken.” A big part of the issue, clearly, is that I don’t write very often on my phone, so the keyboard hasn’t had a chance to build a big vocabulary. But there are flaws in the system as well. One is that it seems to focus mainly or exclusively on the word you’ve just written, and not take into account the context of the whole sentence, much less the one before it. I guess the next step for me is to download SmartKey or Swype and give it a spin.
I just hope I don’t get tooken.
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