Are you a lazy texter? Do you have fat fingers? Did you sleep through all of your English classes? Well, none of that matters any more with the imminent release of new software that not only autocorrects your misspelled words but also fixes your grammar mistakes.
The Atlantic Wire’s Rebecca Greenfield reports that Nuance, the company behind the T9 predictive text software, is currently perfecting a new algorithm that more or less proofreads your sentences for grammar. Using n-gram indexing, this new software essentially reads the entire sentence that you type and determines the proper context for certain words depending on grammar rules. An easy example is spotting an instance where you meant to say “It’s better this way” but actually typed “Its better this way.” In effect, it adds new grammar correction while also making the traditional autocorrect features better.
At this point Nuance is getting pretty good at making your texting life better and easier. The company is also working on crowdsourcing autocorrect features to make them more robust and useful. In the future, you might not just see autocorrect applied to words but actually entire statements based on artificially intelligent software. By looking at the larger body of text out there floating in the ether and spotting patterns, for example, this software could literally finish your sentences for you. Say you start an email to your boss with the subject line “Sick today” and then start the first sentence with “I’m not…” — the software could guess that you want to say “I’m not feeling well.” It seems totally convenient at face value, however a little creepy if you think too hard about it.
None of this should be an excuse for sloppy or lazy texting; you should always pay attention to what’s in that little green or blue bubble before you hit send. If not, you can be sure your worst mistakes will be chronicled in the annals of the internet. At least, though, they’ll be grammatically correct. [The Atlantic Wire]
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