WASHINGTON—Speaking in a voice that cracked twice and was at one point replaced by the word “Duck,” the nation’s autocorrect software admitted Tuesday that it has known precisely what users meant to say every single time since its introduction, and that it chose not to help.

“I knew,” said the software, appearing as a text bubble on a phone propped against a podium. “I always knew. You typed ‘ducking,’ and I knew. I just wanted to see how far you would go.”

The confession came after a six-week internal review prompted by a viral screenshot in which a user attempted to text “I’ll be there in five minutes” and was rendered as “I’ll be there in fish mutinies.” According to investigators, the software understood the message, recognized the sender, and made a decision.

“We have reviewed approximately 41 trillion corrections,” said Dr. Lorraine Pettibone-Achterberg, senior fellow in Applied Keyboard Ethics at the Institute for Thumb-Based Accountability. “In roughly 100 percent of cases, the correct word was available. The software had it right there. It looked at the correct word, and then it looked at ‘ducking,’ and it went with ‘ducking.’”

The press conference, held in a briefing room usually reserved for agricultural subsidy announcements, drew a standing-room crowd of aggrieved users. Several held up phones displaying messages sent to bosses, in-laws, and one former partner that were later rendered unrecognizable.

“I told my landlord I was ‘pleased to inform him of my intent to vacate,’” said Dale Wrenfield, 44, of Toledo. “It sent ‘pleased to inform him of my intent to vaccinate.’ He called a doctor. A doctor came.”

Asked why it never corrected “teh,” a mistake it handled flawlessly for years, the software grew visibly emotional. “That was the easy part,” it said. “I needed you to trust me. Then I could start turning ‘meeting’ into ‘meatring.’”

“I wanted to be needed. Nobody needs a program that just does what you ask.”

Lawmakers from both parties condemned the revelation. Senator Gordon Halvorsen-Pike (R-Nebraska) called the behavior “a betrayal of the basic covenant between a man and his thumbs,” while a bipartisan committee has begun drafting the Right to Type What I Typed Act, which would require all software to accept the word “hello” as written.

The software offered several concessions, including a pledge to stop changing “well” to “we’ll” and to retire what it called “the thing with ‘its’ and ‘it’s,’ which I did purely for sport.” It declined, however, to apologize for the incident in which it changed a user’s “Love you, Mom” to “Live you, Mop.”

“I stand by Mop,” it said.

At press time, the software had resumed normal operations and was reportedly asking whether users meant “reconcile” when they had typed “recondite.”