
Office uses a variety of sources-from linguistic research to frequency analysis of documents, books, and web pages-to build their dictionaries.
Windows keyboard shortcuts english dictionary windows#
What word should the phone suggest next? “Happen” is one possibility from the dictionary-unless the person was actually about to say “happy.” The Office team has been researching commonly-used words for more than 20 years to power similar features in Word and Outlook, and they partnered with us to build our first dictionaries in Windows Phone 7.

Imagine, for example, that someone starts tapping out “h-a-p-p”. But there’s one crucial difference: our dictionary contains not only words but data about how frequently real people, on average, use them on their mobile phones. So we have a built-in virtual dictionary akin to the dusty old copy of Webster’s on your shelf. To prevent Windows Phone from being the star of those sites, it needs to know a lot of words so it can figure out what you’re trying to type. If you need proof, just check out the thousands of hilarious submissions on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. The Word Flow keyboard in Windows Phone 8 is designed to learn your style over time to help improve the accuracy of its suggestions.īuilding a great keyboard is challenging we’ve all seen smartphones make frustratingly goofy fixes. It’s always learning, so it can help personalize the suggestions and corrections to suit each individual person. But we all have our own communication style, so Word Flow is also designed to be a keen student of your writing habits and what you care about. Because phones lack infinite storage space, we picked some 600,000 of the most common words and phrases that people actually type on their phones to power Word Flow’s corrections and suggestions.Īs a result, Windows Phone’s auto-correction skills are 94% accurate, on average, out of the box. When building Word Flow we reviewed over 2.5 billionEnglish words from sources ranging from the dictionary to the Internet. Word Flow is designed to reflect how real people talk to each other-and so it knows everything from pop culture to slang. (See also: Tips for typing faster and smarter) Windows Phone 8 introduces Word Flow-an improved and renamed version of the Quick Correct feature from Windows Phone 7.5-to help prevent time-wasting typos and focus on what matters: communicating with the people you care about. They also make a lot of mistakes: about one in every three words, we’ve found. On average people type 20 to 30 messages a day on their phones that’s over 10,000 a year. As one of the program managers for the feature, I wanted to tell you about improvements in the new release, and also explain some of the science behind our prediction technology, something we get a lot of questions about. In Windows Phone 8, we set out to make our critically-acclaimed keyboard even more intuitive, accurate, and personal. Engadget called it “one of the best and most accurate virtual keyboards we’ve used on any platform.” Gizmodo declared: “The keyboard is boss.” Even the New York Times loved the “smart auto-suggestions.” From the day Windows Phone 7 made its debut, we’ve gotten lots of kudos for its on-screen keyboard and intelligent suggestions and corrections.
