The regular key-by-key will also do some probabilistic changes. Just less than the swipe interpreter.

“Male chauvinist pig” is something many would be very upset to send to their boss by accident. So it’s perhaps understandable some such phrases are not excluded from the guesswork.

Step 1: a word of 4-6 letters that's somewhat close to "male". Say "name" or "masked". Look at the key positions, you'll see what I mean.

Step 2: a word that's even less close to chauvinist, and that makes sense after the word you intended, but no sense after "male", so the guesser picks "chauvinist", based on its incorrect first guess and your second swipe.

Step 3: ditto.

We might not talk about a "narrow contingency put" or "Maria crating PVC" very often, but an uncensored autocorrect would almost certainly correct those phrases to the far more common "male chauvinist pig" in the rare cases where someone did try to swipe them.

I know these are all typos because she’s a really close friend and easily the last person who would be offensive to other people.

So yes, you’d be surprised at what people can typo on a phone.

The difference matters enough that preemptively suggesting "pig" is not a desirable "service" for most people.

This would probably be a bad customer experience for many people, even if Apple could prove these are simply the most common n-gram completions.

And if they altered their training data to avoid completions that are politically unpalatable, IMO that's actually much much worse than a grey list.

I'm a big free speech guy but this one is genuinely a bit complex.

Or we could just type the whole sentence we need.

Tech-illiterate online mobs enraged by Apple “making a statement” will not stick around long enough to hear them argue about n-grams or whatever.

Or imagine if it auto-completed "the Holocaust is" with "a myth created by the ZOG"! I don't like these "imagine if X was Y" arguments because X isn't Y. Refusing to auto-complete "the occupied territories" (X) is really not the same thing as refusing to auto-complete antisemitism or group-based hate speech (Y). Argue whether X is right or wrong without changing the subject.

Most people are not against transsexuals and gays.

At least in the western civilization, I don’t see why it need to censor anything.

In the Bay Area?

In the United States?

In the Middle East?

In India and China?

All of planet earth?

What you're really saying, perhaps without realizing it, is "I have zero empathy or theory of mind for people who have different views than me"

The whole reason these arguments exist is because power changes hands. If you like a rule only because the person currently wielding power aligns with you, you don't actually like the rule. You just like power.

- [ ] Disable autocomplete swear filter.

Disable swears, alcohol, smoking, marijuana, gambling, child abuse and neglect, sensitive East Asian politics, sensitive Middle Eastern politics, WWII politics, Late Ottoman genocides, LGB issues, T issues, HOA issues, vegetarian issues, vegan issues...

To which the obvious counterargument is just “well of course they can stop at just one toggle. That’s not an excuse to have zero toggles”.

The team had heard that most customers only use 5% of Word's copious feature set, and as part of some rewrite the team set about finding out what the 5% were.

And it was most of the feature set. Customer A used these 5%, B these others...

It's easy to say just one option without describing exactly what that should do. L10n raises some questions, for example. Or just two options, or three. Much harder if you want to be specific.

The store you mentioned wasn’t about exclusions from each and every dictionary. It was about tools that do entirely unique things.

Do you make the same argument for everything?

"You shouldn't treat yourself to a takeaway because what if you want more takeaways?"

"You shouldn't buy a car because what if you want more cars?"

etc.

Consider the logic for tap’s could offer hundreds of customizations. That’s core functionality and I’m sure someone internally is thinking deeply about many of them. But if you offer zero customization most people just get used to how things operate so skipping that functionality isn’t terrible for the average user. Instead they offer options for people with disabilities which is a distinct group who can’t just adapt and thus a meaningful justification.

But any prediction picked by Apple without user input could be seen as Apple’s speech. If it’s suggested by Apple then they aren’t censoring you, they are censoring themselves.

Talking about autocorrect and irritation, I remember a situation where someone caused a minor international incident by writing that something "caused a lot of irritation". The word they were aiming for before autocorrect chimed in was "iterations" (on a document). I'd rather make my own mistakes than constantly have to fight an autocorrect system.

Of course, people will still accuse Apple of being biased. But they’ll be wrong, and never manage to prove it (unlike this guy), which I think matters.

It'd be a better if Apple provided a list somewhere for transparency but what they are doing isn't going to cause anyone any trouble.

This isn't about "promoting bad spelling"; we aren't talking about "misspelled 'bad' words don't get autocorrected". We're talking about a system where you try to type a "bad" word and the system substitutes a "good" word unless/until you override it. Or a system where you effectively choose every word from a menu, and the "bad" words are hidden using UI "dark patterns".

How does free speech come into it? Suggestions are not limitations (by a private company) on your output.

I'm against Apple's attempt to meld popular speech into a form that it thinks is acceptable on two accounts—I'm not the fastest typist so when prediction doesn't work the way I want it to it slows me down. Second, I'm in Australia and Australians use very colorful expressions in everday speech that seem to trigger the sensibilities of many delicate American ears. In short, we don't want attempts to censor what we say.

If one has to introduce censorship into prediction then users should have the option of either turning it off or selecting a graded system that best suits their style.

In fact that's not a completely new idea. Eudora email had an option that I rather liked, when selected, users could type whatever they liked then depending on the degree of offense or profanity a series of red chilli icons would appear. Mildly offensive text would bring up an icon with a one-chili warning whereas highly offensive language would automatically trigger a three-chili icon along with a message to the effect "They're burning hot words, do you really want to send this message as is?"

A scheme along these lines seems eminently more sensible than secretly censoring a predictive word list.

    > Second, I'm in Australia and Australians use very colorful expressions in everday speech that seem to trigger the sensibilities of many delicate American ears.

> expressions that Americans use in daily life that would offend Aussies?

Civilian regular (daily, weekly) group pledge of allegiance stuff. We're patriotic, but that OTT flag drapery stuff mostly comes across as on the nose.

I don't think any of the wording of that is the issue though?

Also to be clear that's a schoolchildren-only activity.

Sure your client could want to be ultra sure, but I'd argue the censorship coming from a marketing concern doesn't make it specifically better. If I actually use swear words all the time for instance your software would be constantly penalizing me.

That's a tradeoff they're willing to make, but if I was a user it would be totally fair for me to be pissed and hold it against them.