Probably using cookie. Web browsers and website work together and remember details entered before.  In a sense cookies.  There are now further changes to this.  Machine learning for the browsers some may call it AI but it it is not AI.  

Are they SMART? meters that went Dumb? Lol. The concept of a SMART meter going Dumb is surely an Oxymoron.

Sergio, thank you, but these are dumb meters which seem to have become smart.

Nor can there have been anything like character recognition by my iPad because I had not even looked at the second meter at this stage.

Well its either proof that panpsychism is correct, or that your meters are haunted, or it is a lucky fluke.

I'm going with 'fluke' as the others feel in some way unsatisfactory.

Mike.

You know in 2020 when Bill Gates persuaded us that there was a virus so that he could inject us with a microchip? Well that's what the microchip was for, it reads meter readings from your brain and communicates the data to your computer using 5G, his paymasters were the energy companies.

I have fact checked all the above. Internet says it's true.

(Yes, it has been a long day in the office and yes it is about time I logged off..)

This sounds like the DSO/DNO/MO fixing the issue of SMART meters going dumb before they get the backlash from politicians and general public about how their systems are not fit for purpose and how they have be profiteering from the price of energy at the moment.

When they state that the meter reading that you provided is "correct" I don't think that they mean totally accurate, they mean plausible. If they can accurately determine  the reading, why ask you to read it ?

This is done by calculating the consumption based upon the customer provided reading, and then ensuring that this calculated consumption is reasonably similar to the previously measured consumption. For example if you normally use use 1,000 units a month, they would accept any reading that gave a consumption of between 800 units and 1250 units.

Thank you, folks for your thoughts. The thing about, "correct" is that the checkbox is to certify that what has been entered is correct.

Well yes. The lower reading is the garage and outbuildings and I am prepared to accept that their estimate was close: there is no seasonal variation (as for, e.g., heating) so that could be a fluke.

The other reading cannot be a fluke, because they had already estimated it as a higher reading. Had the earlier estimate been lower, it might have been so, but to be exact and not even 1 kWh out seems remarkable.

looking more closely that screen shot looks like your web browser is attempting to auto complete with numbers it already has cached from the last time you entered a number in a form that looked a bit like that, rather like it 'remembers' and suggests your name after you start typing the first few letters - because usually when you start with those few letters, the rest of your name or whatever  is what you type next.

If that is the case I hope that neither of these proposed readings match a phone, credit card  or bank PIN or anything like that the webbrowser has recently seen typed in somewhere else ?

Mike