I have had trouble using third-party keyboards. Some offer some nice bells and whistles, but iOS and Android invest so much in their native keyboards that beating them at their own game is hard.
That said, there is one keyboard idea that would be quite a good business—if anyone wants to build it. And that is a keyboard that checks your typing for terms that might be offensive to some people and then suggests alternative words, phrases and pronouns.
It would work almost like spell check, but catching mistaken innuendo and inappropriateness instead of misspellings.
A politically correct keyboard could help reduce the amount of rude and offensive comments people make on social media, sometimes accidentally. Technology is often blamed for making it easier for people to say things they’d never express in person. Building a politically correct keyboard would be part of engaging directly with that narrative in a different direction.
Why Now
The fundamental rules of political correctness have never been more important. They have also never been more complicated, and continue to evolve at a faster and faster rate. Even the term “political correctness,” I believe, is now politically incorrect!
At the same time, people interact with each other across more and more applications in more and more varied contexts. Tools for guarding against inadvertently offensive wording need to be available across all applications. That means either baking it directly into phone operating systems, or through the keyboard.
How You Get Paid
Of course, as I have written about before, I don’t believe in products which can’t support big businesses. Here is where I think the politically correct keyboard really shines.
While I believe that for marketing purposes it is worth offering the keyboard for free, the real money is going to be in enterprise and university sales. Companies and universities have a lot to lose when employees and students make political correctness mistakes.
Offensive comments can spiral into expensive lawsuits. Further, being able to say that everyone at your company or school uses the politically correct keyboard could be a major recruiting benefit.
I would start by selling to HR departments. They would likely want some extra features for their employees like custom dictionaries, and the ability to blacklist certain words rather than simply suggest improvements.
At first a basic per-installation monthly charge for the PCK seems like the way to go, but over time you could imagine charging companies for the number of political correctness “saves” that the keyboard makes.
You could even bundle with corporate insurance providers. Companies would lower their risk of lawsuits and icky situations by installing the keyboard, so you could see a world where using the keyboard gave you access to more preferential insurance rates.
The potential at college campuses is particularly tantalizing. Political correctness is all the rage with young people on college campuses.
Why Big Company
It might be easy to see how this is a good small business or acquisition for another enterprise company. But why is this a big company?
First, there is a network play here. Political correctness isn’t just a single-player game. Knowing who you are addressing is as important as knowing who is speaking. The PCK might initially only understand some basic facts about the speaker and use some basic rules to screen for issues of correctness. But my expectation would be that over time there is a real networked data play with the politically correct keyboard where knowing who you are addressing will serve as a feedback loop to improve the correctness algorithm. With enough context and data, it will be possible for the PCK to have an index of pronouns, a personalized understanding of “trigger phrases” and all sorts of other context to help users get their phrasings right. In the Theil spirit, political correctness could be a global monopoly business.
The second is that the political correctness keyboard exists within a blind spot of the big technology companies. Political correctness is a controversial topic. Could a big technology company release a competing politically correct keyboard? Of course! But, to do that they have to be willing to engage with the global population on day one and face the ire of the press and groups that don’t agree with decisions of the politically correct keyboard. A new startup can be set up to weather these issues, but it is much more difficult for big companies—especially those that pride themselves on openness and freedom—to wade into the politically correct wars.
It is also worth noting that judging political correctness lends itself to the type of hybrid AI-crowdsourced system seeing a lot of advances currently.
There is space for a truly big company to be built here.
Conclusion
So, if a serious team wants to go off and build this, please let me know. It has many of the key properties which could make it a potentially fabulous business. I will joyfully be your first beta tester.
However, do not sign up to build this lightly. It will be a flashpoint of controversy. You will likely have the distinction of being skewered by the literati and the Trump troglodytes simultaneously—which in itself is an impressive achievement. You will also probably be lauded by the college crowd and corporations if you spin the story well.
By 2018 the tables may have completely turned, and your supporter and detractor base may have completely flipped.
That’s the signature of what I’d call inevitable technology companies, which have both good and bad characteristics that people will debate ad nauseum. In the end, however, if it is useful and something which helps some people, it will happen eventually. If you are interested in the problem, it might as well be you that builds it.