Apple iOS 13 Autocorrect Fails: Focus On Privacy Weakens Apple's AI, Experts Say

Most of us want digital privacy, and most of us also want autocorrection that works, speech to text that is accurate, and smart systems that find all our selfies with Serena, or surface the most important emails we need right now. But are those two imperatives in direct opposition? According to some tech analysts and AI experts, they are. Especially those who are experiencing huge issues with iPhone's autocorrection capability in Apple's latest mobile operating system upgrade, iOS 13. "It's way worse on my iPhone," says veteran industry observer Robert Scoble, chief strategy officer at Infinite Retina. "And I've tried several things to fix it, including deleting all the settings and deleting all the history and trying to reboot everything ... I'm seeing a lot of bugs in the spellchecker where it's putting capitalization where it doesn't need to go, where it's switching words a lot more often than it used to. Apple's iOS 13's spellcheck was so bad Scoble ran a Twitter poll, asking his 400,000 followers whether they had similar issues. Twitter polls are hardly scientific, of course. But there's a broad range of people who are claiming that Apple's recent software release has been a big backward step in terms of autocorrection. "iOS 13 got significantly worse for me," says mobile entrepreneur Albert Renshaw, CEO at Apps4Life. "I've been learning French with Duolingo and have been typing in French every day for a little over a year in that app, but have never had an issue with it affecting my autocorrect.