Steve Cooper

Somewhere between spell checking and grammar checking is a need for context-specific word checking. I’ve been doing a little writing on the soft keyboard of the iPhone and noticed that while the spell checker is great at correcting mis-spelled words, it is not good at helping you out with words within a certain context. Consider typing this;

Science diction

Now, that’s a single character incorrect; both words are spelled correctly, but so rarely occur together in English prose that we may suppose there is probably a spelling mistake here. Any mobile provider that gets this right will probably make these keyboards entirely workable. It may not be so relevant on full-sized keyboards, but these smaller keyboards have implicitly more mistakes. Much smaller keys combined with big fat thumbs makes this kind of mistake much more likely. In fact, I’ve done it four times this post;

Fill-sized keyboards
Big far thumbs
Done it twice this lost
Dome it three times this post
Done it four tomes this post

Awful. I can’t even wrote the list of my mistakes without making the same type of mistakes over and over.

Anyway, I think if this kind of correction could be built into a smartphone editor, it would lead to much faster typing. You would be able to slap in text much faster, not worrying so much about what you really typed, and have the editor figure out from a corpus of English text what you probably meant.

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