About ducking time: Apple fixes up autocorrect in iOS 17

It's taken a ducking long time, but Apple has tweaked iOS's ducked-up autocorrect to get rid of its tendency to replace swearing with waterfowl references. Apple SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi shared news of the change at WWDC this week by cheekily commenting that, "in those moments where you just want to type a …

[Mayday]

Fuck a duck.

About ducking time.

[MetalScythe]

Fucking dinally.

Can confirm, the transformer models prevent the ducking mallards from transforming (lelel) a usually serious tone into neither seeing-red aggravation, nor coffee-out-the-nose hilarity.

I don’t miss either.

[DS999]

There's been a way around this for ages

Just add a few well chosen words to the ducking dictionary (in the Keyboard settings)

What this sort of learning behavior will be useful for is when you are typing last names that aren't in your contact list that are too close to a word autocorrect wants to change it to. I could add those to the dictionary to prevent it, but too often it falls in that gap between "happens often enough to be annoying" but "not often enough to be bothered to teach it that's a word".

[The commentard formerly known as Mister_C]

The bustards are fixing auto corrupt

Ornithologists are advised to type "oxyura jamaicensis" when discussing the Ruddy Duck.

[Far out man]

As you have explained how to get the developer version, is there any {good} reason why there is no info on how to back up the phone to assist in re-installing the current OS if things go wrong.

[hardboiledphil]

back up

It's no different from normal backup you should probably do before any upgrade. Plug it into your mac/PC and let the OS/iTunes back it up.

[Arthur the cat]

No imagination

I'm disappointed that iPhone owners haven't taken the duck theme on board and started using "Oh Quack!" as an expletive.

[Spanners]

US Corporate Purience

This has been a problem on the Internet as long as it has existed.

As the Register tries to become more & more US oriented, will we expect it ever more here?

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: US Corporate Purience

I fully expect that words like Essex and Sussex will soon be banned by our US overlords where naturally any hit of anything to do with a bit of nookie is verboten. After all, they have their Puritan masters to look up to.

Banning all those books including the Bible shows how far and fast they are regressing.

[Excused Boots]

Re: US Corporate Purience

Well especially the Bible, now if there has ever been a single book* arguably, responsible for more deaths and suffering in human history, I’d be glad to be corrected.

* and yes, of course I know that a ‘book’ and the word within it can’t harm anyone, it’s the morons who read it, take it at face value and think that their interpretation gives them cache blanc to do what ever they want, because, well, it’s what God wants...!

[Shardik]

Now please can they fix the continual annoyance of replacing correctly spelled words with other correctly spelled words? So tired of it changing ‘if’ to ‘of’ and ‘in’ to ‘on’ and ‘as’ to ‘is’ etc… I finally disabled autocorrect entirely and now only have my own fingers to blame when nothing I say makes sense,

[CrazyOldCatMan]

@shardik

now only have my own fingers to blame when nothing I say makes sense

Although Kelderick-plays-with-the-children can doubtless translate it for you..

[SkippyBing]

So that explains why it's so bad. I thought it was me not being familiar with Apple devices when I typed messages on my other half's iPhone that made it such a painful experience.

You know Android auto-correct is pretty good and lets you use all kinds of swear words right?

[agurney]

By taking the context into account hopefully other irritating stuff can be addressed, such as the tautological ".. autocorrected words will be underlined with the ability to revert them back"

[ps2os2]

I stopped buying the IPAD (early buyer)

The early IPAD did not have a qwerty keyboard. My typing went to hell. I stopped buying IPADS just because of that. Apple's dictates lost them a customer. Just like Apple dropped a feature in CALENDAR where it used to allow playing an MP3 when an event occurred. Now I have to use another APP and that cost me money. I love Apple but I am slowly going back to the dark side.