Many of us use Android‘s Google Keyboard to speed up all that typing on our handsets. However, it has now been revealed that autocomplete feature of Google Keyboard filters out 1400 select words when suggesting autocomplete options.
Autocomplete on Google Keyboard allows you to complete a word merely by typing the first few letters. The predictive algorithm of the keyboard is then able to discern what you are trying to type and suggest the entire word. A single tap and you insert the whole word without having to type it all.
The feature is really useful and widely used by the Android users. However, a recent piece from Wired suggests that Google has banned 1400 words from its autocomplete dictionary. This means that if you type any of these 1400 words, they will not be suggested or recognized by Google keyboard. You can, of course, manually enter the words and still use them howsoever often you want on your Android handset.
The exact list of these 1400 words has been discovered by looking into the source code of Android Kit Kat. The list includes a wide range of words relating to sexuality, male and female genitalia, racism, culture-specific and religion-specific terms and more. Absurdly enough, the list also contains some highly obscure terms such as ‘irrumination’ as well as such words which are perfectly alright to use, such as ‘geek.’
It remains to be discovered what is Google’s rationale in removing these terms from the autocomplete. Nonetheless, some have argued that saying the search giant has ‘banned’ these words makes no sense since one can still type them on an Android handset and even enable their autocompletion by turning off the filter on Google Keyboard. In a way, that makes sense. And the online outrage over the list may have more to do with the nature of the terms rather than the nature of their restriction on Android.
Source: Wired
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