Autocomplete Presents the Best Version of You
meme—which works for both Android and iOS—can be found on social media. Not interested in predicting your 2019? Try writing your villain origin story by following your phone’s suggestions after typing “Foolish heroes! My true plan is …” Test the strength of your personal brand with “You should follow me on Twitter because …” Or launch your political career with “I am running for president with my running mate, @[3rd Twitter Suggestion], because we …”
Gretchen McCulloch is WIRED’s resident linguist. She’s the cocreator ofLingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, and her bookBecause Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Languageis coming out in July 2019 from Penguin.
In eight years, we’ve gone from Damn You Autocorrect to treating the strip of three predicted words as a sort of wacky but charming oracle. But when we try to practice divination by algorithm, we’re doing something more than killing a few minutes—we’re exploring the limits of what our devices can and cannot do.
Your phone’s keyboard comes with a basic list of words and sequences of words. That’s what powers the basic language features: autocorrect, where a sequence like “rhe” changes to “the” after you type it, and the suggestion strip just above the letters, which contains both completions (if you type “keyb” it might suggest “keyboard”) and next-word predictions (if you type “predictive” it might suggest “text,” “value,” and “analytics”). It’s this predictions feature that we use to generate amusing and slightly nonsensical strings of text—a function that goes beyond its intended purpose of supplying us with a word or two before we go back to tapping them out letter by letter.
The basic reason we get different results is that, as you use your phone, words or sequences of words that you type get added to your personal word list. “For most users, the on-device dictionary ends up containing local place-names, songs they like, and so on,” says Daan van Esch, a technical program manager of Gboard, Google’s keyboard for Android. Or, in the case of the “Aegon Targareon” example, slightly misspelledGame of Thronescharacters.
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