Indulge me in a little Friday rant. I like predictive text on my handsets, I really do. Makes things a lot easier — most of the time. But I never cease to be amazed at some of the words in the dictionary. It’s something of a rite of passage for a new handset when I overwrite “shiv” and add “shit” to the dictionary for the first time, but it’s sort of silly. Would it really kill anybody to put that in there? And do people use the word “shiv” more than “shit”?
Earlier, I was typing an SMS about the band The Verve coming to town. “Verve” wasn’t in the dictionary, which was a little surprising, but the choices it gave me were “teste,” “veste” and “verte.” Teste, sure, that’s a word, but I’m pretty positive it’s one I’d never use in a text. “Veste” and “verte,” as far as I can tell, aren’t English words. (I don’t generally write messages in other languages, but I can see how predictive text might get even more irritating for people who do.)
Obviously this isn’t a big deal, but it’s slightly annoying to type out a word using predictive text, only for the phone to not recognize it and suggest some non-word instead, at which point you’ve got to triple-tap your original word to add it to the dictionary. Say I want to tell a friend to meet me at Caesar’s Palace here in Vegas. I go to type “Caesar” and it gives me “Bearar”. Bearar doesn’t appear to be a word in English, nor the root of one — so why’s it in the predictive text dictionary at all?
Like I said, not a big deal, and it’s as amusing as it is annoying to see the bizarre non-words it tosses up. What are some of your favorites?
Update Ricky Cadden from Symbian-Guru pointed out this hilarious video on the topic:
Clearly you missed this gem of a video going around recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hcoT6yxFoU
Genius. Thanks Ricky!
I have a counter-example!!! Last time I was in NY I sent Russ the message “The key to successful subway riding is to shiv the first people who smiles at or talks to you.” Sure, I’ve struggled with the lack of shit more often than I’ve been impressed with the presence of ’shiv’, but in that particular case I was happy it was there.
I think my favourite has to be that book comes up before cool in T9. This made (I believe) a lot of kids start saying stuff like “that’s well book” in RL.
Quite a few articles on this a couple of weeks ago!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/05/ntext105.xml
What a load of ASAP, eh?
Dean
Predictive Text Commission’s Words you should Use!
http://www.mobilepointview.com/2008/03/predictive-text.html
Greatly enjoyed the video; nice laugh!
I agree. The whole thing is a complete citag.
Caesar” and it gives me “Bearar”
of course this only happens if you mistype caesar, it looks like you types ceasar in which case they should just give up at bear! Love the videa
Hilarious!
T9 on S60 spells out the next unfinished word if there are no more words left of that combination of key presses left in the dictionary. ‘Shiv’ is halfway to ’shiver’ and ‘teste’ is nearly ‘tester’.
I love the way ‘book’ is used instead of ‘cool’ in UK street-slang because it comes up as the first T9 word out of the two.
Heh.
We made a wiki page about T9, related to this post.
http://cognections.typepad.com/lifeblog/2007/01/t9onym_wikipedi.html
(our stuff was later folded into another entry)
In another story, I have a colleague who chronically misspells in t9. One day he used a word that came out ‘poetigog’ which seemed appropriate for the sentence where poetigog means a mixture of poetic injustice and agog.