Does text recognition cause errors and “hallucinations”? You’re not alone

The next “butks” stop. Eating a “bans bc a”. It’s called mi-long-shiny-sync.

The above gibberish came up on my phone the other day when I texted the words “bus,” “banana,” and “no longer useful,” admittedly in a hurry and on an outdated operating system.

But if internet chatter is to be believed, the intuitiveness and efficiency of autocorrect and text prediction have plummeted in recent years.

In online forums moderated by major mobile phone companies Samsung and Apple, there are long lists of complaints about the declining intelligence of their predictive text and autocorrection models.

These include automatically correcting a correct word with an incorrect word, repeating the error multiple times even when the user deletes and re-types, failing to capitalize letters like a single “I,” or inserting nonsense words like “tondel” when a person meant to write “an,” or, as one person said, consistently writing “Theresa” instead of “the.”