Apple’s ‘ducking’ expletive autocorrect will finally go away

It’s probably happened to all of us. You’re on your iPhone typing a message to a friend and want to drop a certain swear word a few times to express excitement or frustration. But, when you hit send, all you see is a flock of “ducking” words flying around. What the heck is going on?

For those of us who like to add a little spice to our texts, Apple’s newest message technology will stop automatically censoring our expressive texts.

The software update announcement was made during Apple’s June 5 presentation for its World Wide Developers Conference in California. During the 2-hour video presentation, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, referenced the annoying glitch and how the company plans to fix it.

As part of the iOS 17 update scheduled to be released in September, the iMessage app will get upgrades to its autocorrect feature thanks to a bit of help from artificial intelligence. This new operating system takes a user’s input and learns about his or her writing habits. From there, the iMessage app can make word predictions and make grammatical corrections within sentences.

And yes, Federighi promised users they could finally start typing that particular word and not get it swapped out with a waterfowl.

“And in those moments when you just want to type a ducking word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” he said in the prerecorded presentation.

The new autocorrect improvement is one of many updates to Apple’s operating system for its iPhones, iPads and more. Other features discussed in the announcement include:

• A new Journal app that allows users to create multimedia diary entries right on their device
• Live Voicemail: a feature that provides a real-time transcription of voicemails from callers so the recipient can answer the call before the person hangs up
• Improved experiences with AirDrop and NameDrop so users can easily share photos, files and contacts with other iPhone users.

Look at the complete list of updates coming to the new Apple iOS17 later this year on the official website and be ready to express yourself more freely and creatively than ever!