New phones. Mostly, they're great. When texting, there are helpful little suggestions about the word you might be trying to type so you can write messages faster. Supposedly, the algorithm used to create the suggestions takes into account the previous word so that if you type the word "happy" it will automatically suggest "birthday" as the following word. My question for the software designers is this: Why does my phone suggest the word "children" after I type the word "rotisserie"? Granted, it's probably not a word used in everyday parlance but I'm sure there are hundreds, nay thousands, of people each day who might text to a loved one, "Would you mind picking up a rotisserie chicken for dinner?" or "I simply must have that new $500 turkey rotisserie and fryer from Williams-Sonoma." One would think common words that follow rotisserie would be "chicken", "grill" or "yummmm", but no. Children apparently is what comes to mind when the programmers think of a rotisserie which brings up the very disturbing possibility that our phone's messaging app has been designed by a ruthless tribe of cannibals. We switched to a Samsung Galaxy from an iPhone because we valued the way we could personalize it so much easier, and the way that it talked to our computers nicely instead of swearing at them in a foreign language or worse, refusing to communicate at all- but now I am concerned that we may have erred. As much as I didn't love things about our iPhones, at least we weren't propping up a corrupt regime of child cookers! Yeah, I'm looking at you Verizon Message+. I guess I'll just have to find a new app, preferably one with a catchphrase like, "People. We don't eat them." That would be good.
Update January 2016: My phone no longer suggests "children" following the word rotisserie. It now suggests "chicken", "?" or "the". See? I must have made a difference in the world. Either that, or my phone just figured out that we really like rotisserie chicken....
No comments:
Post a Comment