London, Jan 1 (IANS) Predictive text, a marvel of mobile phones that has made it quicker and easier to communicate with people, has been blamed for errors that can sabotage relationships by leaving users fuming.
Predictive texting is a facility that makes SMSing faster especially for phones with non-qwerty keyboard.
The latest submissions to the DamnYouAutoCorrect website show how the simple predictive text misspelling of the words ‘at Pam’s’ resulted in a very awkward conversation between a woman and her boyfriend.
Instead of typing ‘We need to spend some time at Pam’s’ user ‘Jenni’ mistakenly texted: ‘We need to spent some time apart’, prompting a furious reply from her partner, according to the Daily Mail.
And the woman who asked a friend if she wanted ‘any bleach’ from the dollar store, was horrified when predictive text interpreted it as ‘anal bleach’.
Modern mobile phones come with a built-in dictionary which enables them to predict what word a user wants from only a few key presses.
Each key represents three letters. It differs from an older system in which users had to hit keys several times per letter, for example pressing the ‘5’ key three times for the letter L. For this reason, phones can often predict a completely random word – often with hilarious results.
For example, it is easy to end up asking a friend out for a quick riot (pint) or telling them about being stuck in a Steve (queue).
A study in 2009 found predictive text messaging changes the way children’s brains work and makes them more likely to make mistakes generally. Scientists said the system trains young people to be fast but inaccurate.
Previous research has shown that predictive texting makes people sloppy when it comes to spelling, with many flummoxed by words such as questionnaire, accommodate and definitely.
