Your iPhone and iOS 17 Now Let You Type What You Ducking Mean

If you're tired of your iPhone keyboard always autocorrecting your swear words, you're going to love Apple's improved and more sophisticated autocorrect feature -- which makes cussing so much easier. Now, your iPhone will finally let you swear to your heart's content. 

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The iPhone's keyboard on iOS 17 leverages a transformer model, similar to what OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) uses in its own language models, to learn from what you type on your keyboard to better predict what you might say next, whether it's a name, phrase or curse word.

If you've downloaded iOS 17 (here's our full guide on getting the latest software update) and want to learn more about typing on your phone, here's everything you need to know about autocorrect.

Autocorrect's accuracy has improved

As mentioned before, autocorrect now fixes mistakes for you in a more accurate manner by taking advantage of a new transformer language model in iOS 17. 

In short, a transformer language model is a complex software program designed to handle language in a sophisticated way. It's trained by certain data, and then learns context and patterns to provide improved results, mimicking how humans think and speak. It's how ChatGPT is able to give you such complicated answers.

And in that same way, the transformer language model on iOS 17 learns from what you type and gives you autocorrect options that are more accurate -- and customized to what you might say.

Note: This technology is only available on the English, French and Spanish keyboards.

You can now curse without being 'corrected'

Your keyboard will add curse words and other explicit language that you often use to your personal vocabulary list. It learns your usage in each application (maybe you curse in Messages but not on Twitter) and then provides you with tailored autocorrections, suggestions and predictive text.

If you want to write fuck, you'll no longer have to worry about that being corrected to duck. And shit won't become shut. The list goes on.

There's also inline predictive text

The new transformer language model also now provides you with single- and multi-word predictions directly within the text field you're typing in. For example, I could write something like "Have you watched the new episode of The Wa..." and autocorrect will give me an inline prediction of The Walking Dead.

If you receive inline predictive text and want to complete it without continuing to type, simply hit the space bar to enter the predictive text into the text field.

Note: This feature is only available on the iPhone 12 and later.

Autocorrections are easier to edit

Autocorrect isn't perfect, and so there may be times when you're autocorrected when you don't want to be -- or shouldn't be. This could happen when you're using slang or even using a person's name that isn't spelled in a common way. Whatever the reason, you need an easy way to go back.

On iOS 17, newly autocorrected words and sentences are temporarily underlined so that you can easily see the corrections. If you're unhappy with any correction, you can tap on the underlined word or words to view what you originally wrote, as well as other autocorrect options.