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How can I tinker with the iPhone's autospelling dictionary?

B

bollweevil

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 1, 2008
410
1
I really want to tinker with the iPhone's built-in dictionary that it uses to correct things while I type. The vast majority of corrections it makes are correct and necessary, so I don't want to turn autocorrect off, but there are some corrections that annoy the crap out of me.

Whenever I try to type "hell", it corrects it to "he'll". Little tip, Mr. iPhone: I will never, ever, EVER use the contraction "he'll". I will say "he will", and I don't say that very often. I do say "hell" relatively frequently.

There are many other frequent misspellings that are corrected incorrectly, such as:

im -> I'm (but I meant to write "in")
bren -> Bren (but I meant to write "been")

If I jailbreak my iPhone, can I tinker with its autocorrection algorithm and fix these atrocities?

Also, I always, always want to capitalize the names of towns, how come my iPhone only autocapitalizes them about half the time? Not half the town names, I mean half the time for each town name. Mr. iPhone, when have you EVER known someone to actually want to write "washington" without a capital W?

Thanks.
 
Why not just turn off auto-correction? I finally did that and it has been much easier than having to delete and recorrect.

I'm with you, the dictionary is not very good. I thought it was supposed to "learn" but it always corrects the same words.
 
Like I said, the reason I don't turn autocorrect off altogether is because it is better than nothing. But it is so much worse than it could be.

Also, it clearly does not learn. The closest thing it does to learning is scrub the Address Book for names, and it then corrects to the names and capitalizes them. But I tried putting "Hell van hell" in the address book, and that doesn't work. If what I type is "Hell", and "Hell" is in the address book, it still corrects that to "He'll". So annoying.

And this doesn't come from some puritanical disbelief in the word "hell", because no other curse words that I can think of get corrected into anything else. I just tried a bunch of curse words, even things that don't belong in a dictionary and are just one key away from a dictionary word, and still, no autocorrecting.
 
Applejuiced said:
I hate the "hell" correction too.
Did they really think people dont use the word hell but they only mean to type he'll?
Click to expand...

I'm sure it's entirely based on statistics.

OP: the secret to training autocorrect is always to x out of the correction instead of accepting it and then correcting it. If you do that a couple of times it will pick up on it.
 
I was curious, so I went into Notes and typed hell 15 times, each time "x"ing out of the correction. Never learned it. So, I opened up three other separate notes thinking that maybe it had to be in separate documents and repeated the first exercise. Still no learning.....
 
thelatinist said:
I'm sure it's entirely based on statistics.

OP: the secret to training autocorrect is always to x out of the correction instead of accepting it and then correcting it. If you do that a couple of times it will pick up on it.
Click to expand...

The autocorrect will not learn that way, that statement is untrue. Have you tried it? Doesn't work.

Also, replying to your statement that it is based on statistics: Even if people mean to type "he'll" more often than they mean to type "hell", they should not add in the apostrophe because "hell" is already a correctly spelled word. Think of another example: "not" may be a much more common word than "nit", but "nit" is still a viable English word and thus "nit" should not be corrected to "not", and it is not. Now, if I type "nkt" it suggests "not", which is much more common and a better suggestion than "nit", but if I type "nit" it gives me a little bit of credit as a speller and thinks "maybe he really is talking about nits, and he is not misspelling a negation."
 
bollweevil said:
The autocorrect will not learn that way, that statement is untrue. Have you tried it? Doesn't work.
Click to expand...

Yes, I have tried it. And yes, it does learn. It takes repetition over a period of time, but it does learn. It works best when you do it in-context when actually typing something; trying to train it by repeatedly typing the same word usually gets you nowhere. Just use your iPhone normally and be conscientious about xing out of incorrect suggestions.

That said, there are some words it seems to have particular difficulty with, especially slang and such. I assume this is because such words do not appear in its dictionary. With patience I have taught it nicknames that aren't in my contact.

That said, maybe you should just clean up your language and you won't have this problem. ;)
 
Another quick 'fix' to having the phone recognize naughty or unusual words is to add the word as a contact. Mr. F word no longer gets corrected.
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS (JB3.1, unlocked): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

tikitommy said:
Another quick 'fix' to having the phone recognize naughty or unusual words is to add the word as a contact. Mr. F word no longer gets corrected.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's all there is to it. One 'contact' can have several words, too: first and last names, company name, nickname, etc. It works great.
 
My biggest gripe is when I'm trying to type "my" and hit the "n" instead, it doesn't correct it to "my". Ny isn't even a word. It's an abbreviation for New York, but if that was the reason for the omission wouldn't the auto-correct at least capitalize it?
 
My two biggest gripes are the "hell" and "its" auto-corrections. It seems that they are hard-coded into the auto-correct algorithms as special rules, because there is no amount of training that can fix these. Type them into a note, for example, and you can see they are in the dictionary since they have no red dots under them. Yet they will always be corrected with the apostrophe. The "its" problem is worse, because it makes me look like a grammatical idiot. I almost always use "its" (the possessive form) and rarely "it's" (meaning "it is").

The OP asked if there was any way to mess with the auto-correct algorithm with a jailbroken phone. Adding and deleting words from the dictionary seems possible, but the algorithm itself to remove these "features" sounds tricky... So I want to bump this thread in case anyone has found a way to do this.
 
It does take time, but eventually the dictionary will pickup on words you use most often... I finally got my iPhone to stop autocorrecting a certain word to "duck" when typing out sentences.
 
monderick said:
"Inspell" app will do this.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip! Inspell worked like a charm. It's $4, but worth it.

FYI - in the app, just delete everything in the autocorrections and add an entry for "hell" and "its" in there using the same word for both input and output.
 
The problem with inspell 1.3 is that once your iPhone starts running low on memory the spell check quietly takes a dump and stops working...

It's frustrating because it's subtle and you don't realize it until after you've sent a txt that looks like it came from a third grader.
 
Adrian232 said:
My two biggest gripes are the "hell" and "its" auto-corrections.The "its" problem is worse, because it makes me look like a grammatical idiot. I almost always use "its" (the possessive form) and rarely "it's" (meaning "it is").
Click to expand...

I am sure you are in the minority there; a quick Google search indicates that "it's" outnumbers "its" on the web nearly three to one, which mirrors my own usage. The way the iPhone autocorrect is set up, the more common "it's" requires just three taps and the less common "its" only four; changing it would make "it's" five taps. Using these statistics, a user should save six taps for every one tap lost to X-ing out of "its."
 
thelatinist said:
I am sure you are in the minority there; a quick Google search indicates that "it's" outnumbers "its" on the web nearly three to one, which mirrors my own usage. The way the iPhone autocorrect is set up, the more common "it's" requires just three taps and the less common "its" only four; changing it would make "it's" five taps. Using these statistics, a user should save six taps for every one tap lost to X-ing out of "its."
Click to expand...

From my observations, about one in every six times people use "it's" it is used incorrectly when they should be using "its" instead.

Either way, with this new app, I am imposing a new standard to myself: if it is a word, spelled correctly, that I am likely to use it should never be autocorrected to another word; otherwise it should correct. Since installing this app, I have found mistypings that don't correct to anything (rare dictionary words) and other legit words that correct to something else.

Since imposing this system, I am typing much faster and less error prone, especially in situations that make it difficult to see the screen (while driving, for example). The problem is: to x-out a word, you have to look at the screen, find the x, pray you are able to hit it with your thumb (and not a nearby clear button), and then move back to the keyboard and finish typing. An apostrophe is always in the same place no matter what you are doing.
 
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