Every now and then, a software update comes along which seems truly harmful. One such is the introduction of word suggestions that appear in a document while it is being typed. I don’t recall this happening in the past, but recently, it had started to be active in my Word files and in Outlook. One phrase I’ve seen for this so-called feature is “predictive text”. I have since disabled it, but there is a tale to be told about that.
After I had typed something, I would sometimes discover that words had been placed in my document in substitution, in place of, the words I actually wanted to use. Often, those substitutions made no sense. Instead of the ideas I had tried to express, I found myself staring at gibberish. Doing a spelling check didn’t help because the automatically placed words were correctly spelled. I therefore had to visually scour my work to find and correct all of the word errors that the predictive text feature had led to.
This was a nightmare. Therefore, I started looking for a way to disable predictive text and that was a challenge.
I came across one “Help” page that said to first click on “Settings”, then to click on “Mail”, then to click on “Show suggested replies” and then to turn that function off. This was of no help. Nowhere was there anything on screen called “Settings”. There was an icon labeled “Settings xxx”, but after clicking on that, there was nothing labeled “Mail”. In short, these instructions were useless.
A few days later, I went looking again for some way to disable predictive text and on a different “Help” page, I found instructions to first click on “Files”, then to click on “Options”, then to click on “Mail”, then to click on “Replies and forwards”, then to click on “Show suggested replies” and then to turn that function off. This was a whole different set of prompts and guess what! This worked. I was no longer beset by spurious words, even as I typed this page.
A different feature which I also dislike is a text editor that tells me this page has an Editor Score of 96%. The text editor doesn’t like something I’ve done, but I couldn’t care less what that something or that number might be. As long as my document has only the words of my own choosing and organization, that’s all I care about. If someone finds a typo in something I’ve typed, I guess I can live with that.
One of my more frequently encountered peeves is that when I’m trying to find advice via some “Help” resource, the instructions I find tell me to do such-and-such where I will supposedly see this-or-that icon or link and then I discover that the cited this-or-that doesn’t exist, the above scenario being just one such example.
It would be nice if Microsoft, Optimum and other providers were to make sure that their “Help” resources were actually helpful. Too often, they are not just unhelpful, they are obstacles to problem resolutions.
The scourge of predictive text continues.
Today, I had to send an e-mail with the name of a particular house plant called Duchesnea Chrysantha. Admittedly, this is not a name you would encounter frequently. Thus, with stubborn persistence, my cell phone's e-mail tool kept changing the name Chrysantha to Chrysanthemum.
The two names are NOT references to the same plant but as many times as I retyped the correct plant name, the e-mail software kept changing the name to whatever some coder someplace, someone whom I would like to confront, decided must be the required word.
Consider the arcane terminology one often finds in the sciences. Botany, chemistry, physics, zoology, ichthyology, paleontology, immunology and more all have words whose spellings are anything but intuitive. In spite of that reality, we are confronted with the utter IDIOCY of the predictive text handicap.
After great effort, I think I have managed to managed to totally disable predictive text on this PC which has thus allowed me to actually type this comment, but I cannot find any way to do that on my cell phone.
I am not happy.
Posted by: John Dunn | June 08, 2024 at 08:07 PM