Apple's latest iPhone OS 4 beta adds customizable user dictionary

Users will be able to add and edit their own words to the iPhone's dictionary when Apple delivers the iPhone OS 4 software upgrade to the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS this summer.

One of the many minor features set to be added to the iPhone in the latest upgrade was revealed Wednesday by Gizmodo. The custom dictionary will allow users to add their own words and unique spellings, and will automatically recommend those words as users type them.

The new option, "Edit User Dictionary," can be found in the Keyboard section of the handsets Settings application in beta 4 of iPhone OS 4. There, users can press the plus button and add their own words.

This will allow users to bypass the "learning" feature found in previous versions of the iPhone OS, where the software will remember when the user chooses to discard a recommended spelling from the built-in dictionary.

When iPhone OS 4 was formally announced in April, Apple highlighted seven major features in the operating system upgrade. It also noted that the update would pack in more than 100 minor features, but did not go into detail on them.

As new betas of the iPhone OS have trickled out — including the fourth release this week — various new features have been added. Beta 4 includes the ability to view photo camera rolls in landscape, new wallpaper images, an option to turn off MMS messaging, and even suggested that Internet tethering with AT&T could be a part of the new release.

43 Comments

solipsism 25701 comments · 18 Years

About 14 years ago

Ducking he'll, I don't have this feature.

appleswitcher 64 comments · 14 Years

That is glorious.

mavis 25 comments · 16 Years

Quote:

Originally Posted by solipsism

Ducking he'll, I don't have this feature.

That's because it's only accessible if you enable one of the two Japanese keyboards. This feature has been present since beta 1.

Someone might want to edit this news post, because it's flat-out WRONG.

prof. peabody 2858 comments · 14 Years

Originally Posted by AppleInsider

... This will allow users to bypass the "learning" feature found in previous versions of the iPhone OS, where the software will remember when the user chooses to discard a recommended spelling from the built-in dictionary. ...

Could someone "in the know" explain this comment.

It doesn't make sense in that the "previous versions" of the iPhone OS don't actually have a "learning feature" for the built in dictionary. There is the "auto-correct" feature that learns words, but it's not a dictionary nor is it related to the built in dictionary as far as I have heard.

The article also says you will be able to edit the built in dictionary, but then implies that one will only be able to add words, which isn't actually editing at all. For instance this feature would be quite useless for those of us hoping for a UK English dictionary or a Canadian English Dictionary which was my hope when I read the title of the article. If it's just a list of words added in the sense of an additional "custom dictionary" (a la Microsoft Word), then it's only main use would be adding the swearwords back in or adding a list of similarly obscure terms etc.

Is this really a dictionary? Can it really be edited? Some of the articles here are far more confusing than they are illuminating. Perhaps making them more than ten sentences long might help?