--On Wednesday, September 23, 1998, 8:01 AM -0500 "Scott Badger" <wbadger@psyberlink.net> wrote:
> Could one of you from the software clan enlighten me?
> How far away are we from developing a word processor
> with the ability to "learn" the common mistakes made by
> the user. For example, I often mistakenly type "wtih"
> instead of "with". Seems like after a few spell check
> sessions, a program could learn to automatically
> scan the text, recognize my idiosyncratic mistakes,
> and make the necessary corrections. Much less time
> would be spent spell checking. Just an idea that will
> hopefully make some extropian rich and me less
> aggravated.
>
> SB
>
I think we already have that, or at least close. If I type "teh" in microsoft word it turns to "the" automatically, as well as with several other words (this is word97). When you run the spellcheck, and it comes to a mistakenly spelled word, one of the choices you can select is "auto-correct", so that from then on every time you mis-spell that word it will correct it immedietly before you can type the next one. It is much better, for me anyway, that it doesn't automatically learn the corrections by itself, because there are some words not in the dictionary that I don't want "corrected". "Extropian" for example would come out "extortion". If you run the spell check and see all your mis-spellings in a row, it's not so hard to figure out which ones are frequent enough for you to switch to auto-correct.