Autocorrect Based on Contacts and Apps ⇥ twitter.com

Wil Shipley:

Imagine being in charge of an algorithm that hundreds of millions of users depend on every day and saying, “Hey, let’s take any word that’s capitalized in your contacts and just always capitalize it in text messages!”

It’s not just contact names that inform the autocorrect dictionary: any capitalized word in a contact record will be fed into the dictionary, as will installed apps. So, if you know someone who works at, say, Apple, or you have the Transit app installed, you will find yourself regularly undoing the automatic capitalization of those words when talking about fruit or the very concept of public transit. Sometimes, autocorrect will fix its aggressive capitalization after it is given more context by typing several more words; but, frequently, it does not.