880117 - [Keyboard] Autocorrect changes "u" to "I", bad for texting.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Keyboard, defect)

Description

[ebf3141]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; rv:21.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/21.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130511120803

Steps to reproduce:

I tried to text using "u" as an abbreviation for "you".


Actual results:

The autocorrect changed "u" to "I", the opposite of what I meant.


Expected results:

"u" shouldn't have changed.

Comment 1

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

I think that our auto-correct solution ought to correct s->a, like the iPhone does. That seems like a common typo that would be nice to fix. But the consequence is that, in engish, on qwerty keyboards, u auto corrects to I. This would be good if 'u' wasn't a commonly used shortcut when texting.

I can see various ways to handle this without too much special casing:

1) Stop auto-correcting single letters and just always leave them alone. Except we want i->I in english, so we'd at least have to handle single letter case changes.

2) Just add 'u' to the english dictionary so it becomes a valid word. Then we'd still have o->I, but u would not convert.  The only complexity there is that we'd probably want to maintain a separate local wordlists to merge into the upstream android wordlists when building the dictionary.

3) Maintain a separate list of valid words in the settings database, and initialize it to include 'u' as a valid word. That's closely related to bug 868494, but is more of a v1.2 feature.

Needinfo Andreas because he is the one who suggested the s->a correction in the first place. Andreas do you have an opinion about how to handle this?

Comment 2

[David Flanagan [:djf]]

If we go with option 2 for this bug, then adding lowercase 'http' to the local word lists would also be nice. The reporter of bug 881239 found it difficult to type http:// (into a text message) because http would auto-correct to HTTP.

Comment 3

[Andreas Gal :gal]

I am not a usability export but Android has a whitelist. We might want the same thing. The whitelist is basically a list of forced conversions that overrule the main DB. Its pretty short.

Comment 4

[Adam Hyland [:protonk]]

I can't reproduce this under the current gaia master in Firefox Nightly.

Comment 5

[Jan Jongboom [:janjongboom] (inactive)]

Afaik we don't autocorrect single characters anymore.