Can we all agree that whatever version of predictive text we have nowadays is crap, and has been for a long time?

HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 448 points –

I'm sick of random capitalisations mid sentence. I'm sick of common words being replaced by less common ones or even downright nonsense. I'm sick of it taking three attempts to successfully get the word I want. I swear it's been like this for five years or more. Can we have a better version yet, or at least the old one back?

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I tried to swipe some word earlier and it decided what really wanted to say was ConocoPhillips. Why the fuck is that even in the dictionary in my phone? When would I ever want to say that?

For real. If someone could SCTUALLY (oh look another issue. It fails to work out the word if the first letter is wrong far too often) *ACTUALLY answer this question I'd be halfway happy

Phones learn from what you’re typing. The more you type (typo) something, the more they will recommend it to you. Vicious cycle if it auto corrupts it for you, and you miss it/ignore it thinking the other party will understand you fine. Eventually it learns the ironic typos as actual words and then you’re stuck with them when you type. I kind of wish there’s a way to review / manage the autocomplete dictionaries, but I haven’t tried hard enough to find out yet.

On my phone if I hold down on the suggested word in the keyboard area, I can delete it from "learned words." This is only really helpful if it's a typo that isn't also a real word.

My phone still doesn't know what fuck means or suggests it to me when I want to write it even though I use it fairly often. I also daily greet my coworkers over threema and it still hasn't learned what I want to write when my sausage fingers and the too smal keyboard are at a disagreement what should be written.

It was totally to give you content to share today on Lemmy /s

I have wondered for a while if both the predictive and spelling 'help' these keyboard provide are getting broken because they're integrating "what most people do" to your phone.

autocorrect is like downright scary now. you have to double, triple check what you typed is what WAS typed.

At some point, "lets", "well", "ill", "id", and "its" (among many others) have stopped being words, apparently.

I’ve finally had to disabled it. Been a few weeks and while typing is more of an effort on my part, it is also much less frustrating.

The predictive text was far and away the most annoying part.

Disabling autocorrect showcased how bad I am at phone typing. But I have to be very mindful of what is actually corrected and corrected to. Especially in sms where there's no easy edit

Tin foil hat: Spy phone/app/browser looking at what you’re reading and adding it to your keyboard hints. That particular company was mentioned in a recently linked article about the company triggering an earthquake from fracking in northern BC, as well as being sued by the state of California.

I'd assume it was something you'd typed once (maybe while searching or a typo). I always delete those words when they come up (for me that's dragging the word up and a bin appears).

I don’t inderstand, my phone knows that when I type stormloght, what I really mean is Stormlowght instead. (This happened yesterday)

Auto carrot is amazing.

I think it's going good to go home and get a new car and ride the bike and get a ride home and take it easy and take care of it and take care and take care and get some sleep and sleep and relax for me and you can go to sleep and sleep well too if you want to come home to help with me to work on the bed if you want it to work with you and you can come over for me to come over for a little bit if I don't have a chance for -

Inhale

apples and eggs for the night and then I'll get them in my mouth to you when I come home for you if you don't get it or you don't have a lot of money and then you will get a hold on it for the first one and I will get it for you to get the rest for you to do it for them to be done for the next few days and they will get it done before they get there so we can get it and then they can go back and see it and get them done and get the money to get it to you and then you can get the -

Inhale

Bepsi and then go to the store to get the money for you and your family and you will be there for you to go to the house and get the money and you can get a hold up for me to go to your place and get the money for it and get the money for the money and pay it for it to be a little more than a little bit of the way to get you in the back of the house to get it to you to be honest to you and your family and I can go to the store to go out and go to the bank to see if you can go back to work and get a ride home if that's ok if you want me and I don't -

Gboard suggestions are very bizarre.

It seems to very a lot from phone to phone. My current phone is terrible. It "corrects" words I don't want it to, and leaves in obvious typos.

When it changes a word that you've spelled correctly and intentionally into something completely different is when I want to chuck the thing across the room.

Or when it "corrects" a word I didn't want, so I delete the part it changed and then type in what I want to say and it "corrects" it again into the same thing I just deleted. Satan could learn a thing or two from whoever invented that "feature."

it varies per keyboard. you can install third party keyboard apps that offer different dictionaries and autocorrect capabilities.

I disagree. I've been using SwiftKey for years and it's decent. It's by no means mind blowing, especially given the current state of affairs with LLMs, but it's not crap.

Strongly disagree. I'm using SwiftKey, and the prediction has been awful for the last year or so. It constantly tries to force sentences on me and gives me multiple repeated words.

As an example, typing that last sentence, every time I started a word with 'm', it suggested 'more' and 'more than'. If I long press and tell it not to suggest 'more than', then select 'more', the next suggested word is 'than'.

I find that it often repeats the selected word too. Earlier I typed something like 'I did it last year' and the next suggestions were 'year' and 'year ago'.

Microsoft have shoehorned a predictive AI into SwiftKey, and it doesn't work properly.

Hmm I wonder if we just have different settings for it or use it differently. I mostly use SwiftKey these days as a fix for my terrible typing, rather than as predictive text. The predictive text is pretty bad in my opinion, but I'll tell you what SwiftKey thinks about itself below.

(prompt in bold) SwiftKey predictive text is not associated to my records and the other two phases are slack and the other two phases are slack and the other two phases are slack (end of predictions)

It seems Microsoft hasn't added GPT to it yet... Can't even remember the last time I talked about slack.

I've had SwiftKey for a long time as well. My biggest gripe is it likes to change tense/pluralization of words randomly, it seems, as well as dropping post-apostrophe letters. It entirely flips the meaning from "can't" to "can" at the worst, while also makes me seem not so smart when I say "there are 133 word in this comments".

Not crap but pretty dissapointing from the company that owns gpt. Their big new release is the ability to to us gen. AI to create graphical stickers in your texts😔. I think LLM integration into texting is inevitable and will be really the ideal use of this technology, but it will be quite resource taxing and might be another year or two before high quality implementation.

My experience as well!! Maybe it's not 100% accurate but it works well enough I can use it frustration free. Definitely hasn't gotten worse. My only complaint is since the ios 17 update it randomly switches back to the default keyboard until you close and open the text box again but that's not a predictive text problem.

I miss T-9 and physical buttons. I could type out War and Peace with maybe one typo without looking at my phone once. The on-screen keyboards we've had the last ~17 years have been a huge downgrade, IMO.

My friend, I am also slightly nostalgic for the optimism and novelty of the flip phone days. I could text confidently with T9 inside a hoodie pocket during class. But my good friend there is no universe where I want to go back to T9 for the convenience and effectiveness of it. It is not quick compared to anything that came after.

For me, it averages out about the same / maybe a slight benefit for T9.

Yeah, I can type faster on a modern on-screen keyboard, but by the time i go back and correct typos, fight the cursor to get it where i want it, and double check that all the words i meant to type didn't get autocorrected into something else, I could have typed the same thing with much better precision on a T9 style and have, at most, one word to fix.

It's something of a tortoise and hare situation. lol

No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input, is was especially annoying when in the pocket because if you were going too quickly it was very easy to place 1 letter that was a combination of multiple letters.

Heavily rose tinted glasses you have there.

Also enjoy the 50 pixel per inch screen resolution, scroll-everything navigation, terrible Internet browsing, no video streaming, and incredibly proprietary (if any) internal media player. I'm not saying the swipe keyboard hasn't begun becoming enshittified (which auto completes and is a brand new term) and it's slightly annoying, but I would take today's phone over 10 years ago, and 10 years ago over 20 years ago (even a full keyboard BlackBerry, or a t9) any day of the year and twice on leap day.

No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input

only if you were typing letter by letter instead of using the built-in dictionary. you could just press 8-2-5-5 and it would offer both "talk" and "tall", for example.

I'm very much a tech person and can confirm for me personally: T9-Word in combination with physical keys was a much faster, one-handed, and even eyes-off experience. Even when I upgraded to a phone with a slide out full physical keyboard (Samsung Intensity), T9 was still faster. For any word that had repeated keys back-to-back, my hand knew to press the right arrow which would move the cursor to the next position.

I'm purely talking about typing while not looking at the screen (for instance in a pocket like OP mentioned). Not sure why you brought screen resolution into it or media players. I'm not a vintage tech apologist--I'm typing this on an S22 with SwiftKey and it's fine minus a few mistakes. But there was no way I could do this blindfolded. I'd have exited the app and be typing something regrettable into Slack by now.

No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input

My flip phone just let me press arrow right to skip the delay for repeat buttons.

i want my sidekick back. best form factor ever

Never had a Sidekick, but I had several phones with similar landscape slide out / flip open keyboards. Those were the days.

My current daily driver is about 8 years old (a OnePlus 3 that's aged very gracefully thanks to LineageOS), but I do need to replace it soon. Looking at something like the Cosmo Communicator that has a full flip-open keyboard.

im amazed at the fact i stopped caring/needing a more powerful phone 5-6 years ago. its just not a thing that matters anymore... theres no feature or processing speed i would need from a new device despite my phone bein 5 years old.

too bad the batteries arent replaceable as that actually is one of my only concerns.

I have needed a new phone every 2 for the last 6 years because my old one physically broke. Battery might be good, but the screen is cracked: new phone. My last phone quit recognizing the SIM, and so new phone it is. In theory I can buy the parts to repair the phone, but in practice either the parts are obsolete and not stocked, or I can get them special order from China if I'm willing to wait weeks and pay half the price of a new phone. Then hope I actually manage to get the phone together again.

I live in the US where we use many weird by world standards frequencies. I've looked into various repairable phones, (fair phone, pine phone), but I quickly realize I often travel in parts of the US where they won't work. Thus I'm stuck with what my carrier offers. (Apple might be more repairable, but apparently more locked down)

Yep. This 8 year old phone does absolutely everything I need it to do (well, haven't had to deal with AV1 videos yet, so software decoding those might show its age), but the battery is on its last legs.

I'd just replace the battery (involved but not too difficult), but I also want a newer phone with better support for some of the LTE bands near me. I figure 8 years is a good run for a smartphone as a daily driver lol.

Never heard of planet computers until you mentioned the Cosmo Communicator. Their products look really cool!

I’m currently learning Japanese, and one of my favorite things right now is that the “normal” phone keyboard for Japanese is basically a t9 on steroids. It gives you this grid with huge buttons, you tap a letter or swipe in a cardinal direction to get a variant. E.g., the button will show か (ka) and swiping will get you く、け、こ、き (ku, ke, ko, ki).

It is super intuitive and with like a few minutes of training I was typing faster on it than my English keyboard (albeit with my very very limited vocabulary). The buttons are so large it’s hard to miss.

私はねこです。
それいぬをたべましょか。
🐕🐈🐈‍⬛

(I am a cat)
(Should we eat that dog?)

i try to train words that i use as shorthand or slang for years it completely ignores me. i accidently end my email address .comd instead of .com once 5 years ago!! will that thing forget it no never

I remember when you could vaguely swipe at words and they would be magically right, now swipe typing is completely useless and typing normally has maybe a 50% chance of fixing mistakes.

I literally had to move away from gboard because it refused to capitalize "I". Like this is literally the most basic thing it could do and it can't get it right. SwiftKey is only marginally better and a shadow of its former self.

I've been using gboard swiping for idk how many years now and I have no issues with it. There are some words that will less common to get right like say as vs ad or weed vs we'd but it's so quick and easy to press the erase key and then swipe it again. If you do a swipe and then erase it, I've found that it never picks that word again no matter how many reswipes until you've decided on that word and moved on. So if I did want we'd but got weed earlier, weed goes back into the normal prediction priority or whatever as soon as I've moved past we'd.

Or even if I swipe and it isn't the right word, the autocorrect/autocomplete/suggestion bar will be words very similar to the swipe motion I did. I find it has the right word in that bar (if I didn't get the right word in the first place) probably 90% of the time. Similar suggestions by swipe shape also remain for the duration of, eh... that keyboard session for lack of a better term? You lose it if you close the keyboard or switch apps. So if you're just trucking along doing your swiping and notice later that it picked a word incorrectly, you can still go back to it and have the swipe shape-based recommendations.

I have no idea if this stuff is how it works out of the box or if it's because of customization settings I did but it works really well and makes phone typing pretty easy.

Yeah, I've used swipe typing for a really long time myself, and was forced to switch to GBoard when Swype was discontinued, and I can't even begin to express how much better Swype was and I would switch back to it in a heartbeat if they came back and updated it. The accuracy was way better, going back to previous words showed you the same alternate options so you could just keep going and go back to correct when you were done... And probably best of all, it gave more than just the three alternates so it was way rarer that it didn't have the word you were looking for. Even just typing this, I'm having to stop after pretty much every word to make sure it's giving me the right thing, which slows me way down.

Typing on phone could be so much better. It was so much better.

Or how about with apple, when it autocorrects a word, and you want to manually click to the middle of the word, or even to the beginning or end, it fuckin highlights the word endlessly. That’s one of the most frustrating for me.

I’ve Al’s it entirely stopped using swype because it’s so dogshit now. I used to love it.

This sounds like user error to me. Hold the spacebar, then drag your thumb to move the cursor exactly where you want it.

Fully aware of that function. As I said elsewhere, it just doesn’t come naturally to me to do that. It’s like using the arrows on a keyboard to move the cursor through text. It works, but I just use the mouse and click where I want to edit. If using the mouse didn’t work in certain instances, I’d have the same complaint. I want to click where I want, when I want. Not use a function I don’t naturally use when the computer forces me to. See what I’m saying? Doesn’t change the problem that there’s a workaround. It shouldn’t need a workaround for a super basic, incredibly common function.

Actually using the arrows along with ctrl and shift is much faster than taking your hands off the keyboard and using the mouse. Would recommend

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I get so many typos now that aren't even a word. And I seriously can't even wirt proofreading anymore because it's just gotten so bad I no longer even care of I sound like I had a stroke.

Now that I think about it. Autocorrect sucks! It was made to make up for the inferiority of an onscreen keyboard (which I do prefer for this obvious reasons).

When I type on a computer keyboard, after a paragraph or a few sentences, I check if any words has a red underline and that kind of makes me proof read things as I type.

Autocorrect does the opposite, it “fixes” things you type so when you look back it’s fire and you press send.

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My phone knows my age, my account(s) know my age, the phone maker knows my age, so please for the love of the gods stop removing my cusses. It should damn well know that I have almost never intentionally typed "ducking" and yet I often correct words to "fucking"enough to be able to learn some basic usage patterns. I'm 30 years old, stop "correcting" my text like I'm 5.

Also some really obvious words are constantly "corrected". My phone will not let me start a sentence with "We'll". It will, without fail, change it to "Well" and I have to fix it.

Yet if you want to start with well, it’ll always change itself to we’ll. Because of course. (Which I had to go back in and edit twice to make it read how I wanted, because it’s aggressive and will do what it wants even several words later, so be real fucking careful.)

Same with Wed (like Wednesday)/wed and we’d (which I originally wrote in the opposite order but when I wrote the second one it decided I wanted to change the first to match.. so fun!)

But one can’t turn off autocorrect because that’s a disaster too.. impossible to hit the right letters.

I’ve turned off the predictive typing, but still have the basic old style spelling correction enabled. So much nicer. Yes, it’s like moving back ten years, but I am no longer excessively frustrated from typing on my phone. And it was excessive.

If you happen to be on an iPhone, you can add the profanities of your choosing to your dictionary manually, and it will stop autocorrecting away from them.

Now I never duck when I mean to fuck.

SwiftKey will let you say fuck cunt shit all day. I'm sure other keyboards will too but I haven't researched for a better one in a while since this one is fine.

Depending on the keyboard you use, you probably just have to enable profanities in its settings

Yeah, I don't know what happened. This stuff is supposed to reduce typos right? Instead, I type "the" and it replaces it with "Tue" randomly for no reason. Who even writes tuesday like that? It's shorthand from before your keyboard could complete it for you.

You know what's funny? You can't remove words. You can't add words directly, you have to let it learn them the hard way. Why?

At this point, I'm convinced that the steady degradation of technology over the past 6 or 7 years is deliberate, if not, and this stuff can just rot, it's evidence that we shouldn't be relying on it at all.

I finally found the setting in the keyboard to delete the words it has learned so I stop getting the stupid typos it picks instead of actual words. Of course there was no list and I had to agree to delete all learned words which now means I will have to teach it again all of the words in another language that I use regularly.

Would have highly preferred going through the list and deleting the stupid typos it saved. I agree with you that it seems deliberate.

You can add multiple languages to your keyboard and make spellcheck work on them simultaneously

Unfortunately the keyboard I use doesn't support the language I'm referring to but I've not needed it to anyway. It's just frustrating to lose all the words I'd taught it just to rid myself of remembered typos.

I'm on the Google Pixel and it lets me remove words from being suggested, and only takes me a few times tapping out a word to add it to my suggestions. I use swipe and it's only gotten better and better for me.

Does it let you remove words from the dictionary or from your words that were added for you? I know you can do the latter, but the former I was under the impression was not possible.

I'm not sure I understand. If you want a word removed from being suggested / corrected to, you type the word, and then click the word, and immediately above the keyboard there are 3 suggested words. You can press and hold the word to get it removed from being suggested in the future/ defaulted to with swype

Yeah, have exactly the same problems as you, and they started once I switched from SwiftKey to Heliboard. I'm staying on this, because it's FOSS, but Swiftkey is better, in actually letting you remove words from the dictionary, not having that weird Tue thing.

My main gripe is that my phone wants to replace "youre" with "You're" as opposed to "you're" mid sentence. It's bizarre.

If you’ve reversed autocorrect’s decision on something, it will remember it on iPhone. For example, I reversed “Lol” back to “lol” and after that it autocorrected all of them to lower case. You can reverse it I think, it doesn’t affect me much.

Even though gboard is a google product and probably sends a ton of data, the autocorrect has never been an issue for me personally. I can type much faster because it will always autocorrect to what I intend.

Oh how I wish the same was true for languages other than English too… autocorrect has always been borderline unusable with my (granted, smaller) language, and this is true for all of the applications of autocorrect, be it android or iOS or whatever.

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Predictive text is literally the one thing LLM AI would be the best at, and for some reason we don't seem to use it for it.

It would be slow as fuck though if you want it in real time typing.

Takes too much energy(wattage used by gpu/cpu) to get decent AI results compared to current predictive text methods

For me, every time it suggests the correct base word, it gets the ending wrong, so I have to type out the whole word anyway. For example, if I want past tense it'll suggest the present tense of the word.

It's all getting worse, I swear Swype worked near flawlessly fifteen years ago. I've used iNsturalist for years to identify plants and animals. lately it doesn't know what anything is. It thought a bird was a bullfrog yesterday. Search results, GPTs, all nearing unusability.

Yep swype around 2010-12 was the golden age of this stuff. I distinctly remember being on a bus commute being amazed how quickly I could pump out work emails, and documents on way to work on maybe an LG android smartphone with no manual invention required on spelling or grammar. Ancient times. Just typing out this comment on mobile in 2024 I’ve had to recorrect every 4th to 5th word , either I mistyped and it doesnt autocorrect correctly , or its autochanging correct words to wrong ones. I have big fingers but the phone is the higgest I’ve had. Clearly these enshittertech corporations dont make money from making better or more useful products .

Google keyboard was even better that Swype back then. Only when they started trying to make it smarter by scrubbing all our text input did it start getting worse. However they need the pretense to collect all our input so they're never going back.

Gboard was first introduced in 2016, I'm talking 2010-2012.

Google keyboard predates gboard. App view here says 2013, so not quite that range but close.

I actually can't complain. It's not perfect, but I'm far from being as outraged as the OP. I used to love SwiftKey, it was amazing with text prediction, even when you had two languages on at the same time (I'm bilingual, so it was really handy). Since Microsoft bought it, it started going downhill and when I found that I can't just transfer my settings when I get a new phone, I switched to Gboard. Again, not perfect, but not terrible either. I will try out some of the recommendation from this thread though.

I don't have as much trouble with text prediction as with the existent dictionaries for my native language. "Español rioplatense" (argentina, uruguay) exists as an option for many programs and devices but for some reason, it is just a copy from "español de españa". This means, it is constantly trying to correct things that were correct on the first place.

I blame this on american racism and their small view of the world.

Also, i usually write in three languages and text prediction is pretty useful.

If and of, in and on, so and no, these words keep getting corrected for eachother when it shouldn't. I've tried resetting auto correct to make sure I didn't teach it to do that.

Yes, fully agree. They make absolutely no sense at all.

Considering that predicting the next word from context is the one thing LLMs are really good at, I just don't understand how none of these developments have found their way into predictive keyboards.

I've actually switched to ThumbKey and while I don't think I'm faster with it (yet), it's at least so much less frustrating and that's worth a lot to me.

Considering that predicting the next word from context is the one thing LLMs are really good at, I just don't understand how none of these developments have found their way into predictive keyboards.

The problem is that LLMs require a considerable amount of computing power to run, unlike the simple markov chain predictions that keyboards use. You could use a cloud-based service like ChatGPT or something, but most people wouldn't want their keyboards to send all their keystrokes to a remote server... and even if they didn't know or care, the response time wouldn't be good enough for real-time predictions.

Now smartphone SoC makers like Qualcomm have started adding NPUs (neural processing units) with their latest chips (such as the SD8 Gen 3, featured in the most recent flagship phones), but it's going to take a while before devices with NPUs become commonplace, and it'll take a while for developers to start making/updating apps that can make use of it.

But yeah the good news is that it is coming, it's only a matter of "when" - I suspect it won't be long before the likes of SwiftKey start to take advantage of this.

In the case of Google keyboard its crap so as to push people to use the search engine and view ads. I assume its the same for Swiftkey and Bing/CoPilot

Depends - I currently use Heliboard which doesn't seem to have any problems as long as I stick to dictionary words.

Samsung's keyboard sucks though - not only would it miss obvious typos, if you made the same typo often enough, it'd start learning the "word" and autocorrecting the actual bloody spelling to the typo!
(I had a habit of swaping the i and e in their, so of course Samsung decided "thier" was what I clearly meant to type)

Man, I'm using heliboard and it has the same problems openboard had and the same problems gboard has with regard to autocorrect. And it's missing a lot of special characters, but I assume that's a work in progress.

You know what would really help the situation? You know how the spell checker underlines (or at least used to) incorrect words in red? It should underline corrected words in yellow or green or something. That way, when you're going over what you've typed, the autocorrected gibberish won't slip past you and will stand out. That would go a long way, but what would really improve it is if you could remove words from the dictionary that you don't use, and go back to however the system worked 6 years ago because it was pretty light on the frustration.

I don't know about you, but I just swiped my way through the first sentence off this reply with Google's keyboard and all I had to do was select swiped instead of the suggested settled.

They do remember common words that you use, so if you have accidentally "approved" a few misspellings they'll be suggested/given to you more often so a drastic solution to that is to clear your personalised data from the keyboard.

They do remember common words that you use

Sometimes your own peril... I keep getting my ex's name randomly when I'm swiping for another word 🤦‍♂️

I don't seem to have an issue with swiping on my keyboard either except for names and abbreviations/capitalisations but then all phone keyboards struggle with that except for T9 and blackberries. I think it's a small price to pay for such fast and effortlessly swiping for 99.9% of the time.

I sideloaded HeliBoard on Android via F-Droid and the predictive text is coming along nicely the more I type.

Hmmm, wonder why it needs side loaded? Why can they post to the Google store?

Edit: just installed it and f-droid, though. Super easy.

Let me know what you think about it. I also loaded the swipe gesture pack and it is super responsive

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It's strange because it worked perfectly on older phones. Then smartphones came out and it became worse and worse over time.

It worked great on Blackberry and earlier Samsung Galaxy S devices... How did they make it worse?

Gboard swiping is okay, but I agree, there are still some annoyances. Random mid-sentence capitalization is a big one for me.

And no matter how hard I try, no matter what the settings are, no matter how slowly and deliberately I motion, it will absolutely never output the word "fuck" when swiping. It will say "fucking", it will even say "fuckin", but it will never say "fuck".

Gucci. Duck. Tick. Duck. Rick. Dick. Gigi. FICO. Guck.

This was barely funny back in 2009, now it's just embarrassing. WTF even is "guck".

Settings > Text Correction, uncheck third option down "Block Offensive Words"

Fuck fuck fuck cunt bitch asshole (all swipe texted, only the first "fuck" became "duck")

You'd think that would've filtered the "fucking" and "fuckin", though.

It's the first thing I do when I'm breaking in a new android device: aggressively force-training it to accept all my usual expletives.

I got it to type fuck just now when I started swiping from g instead of f, so it wouldn't put a d. if yours is typing guck though, that probably won't work

I gave up on swipe typing and installed a simple, basic, Open Source keyboard. I loved swipe, but got fed up with dealing with the aggravation.

Any touch keyboard can screw up, of course. But going back to tapping has reduced the errors a hundred fold. With the added bonus of extra privacy.

I’ve noticed it getting worse as well. It ducking sucks now.

I turned off autocorrect/predictive text. I got so tired of the errors that I figured I was no worse off with my own typos than dealing with the frustration of having to fix and re-fix stubbornly incorrect words replacing what I meant.

My favorite is how shitty voice to text has gotten over the last year as well

It's literally only gotten worse

A few days ago I tried to use it to message a friend about something cool I saw at work and it sent them a random URL because at the end of a sentence it didn't put a space it just started the next sentence

It's becoming literally useless due to random shit like that

Voice typing is the only thing that suffers OP's complaints in my experience.

My experience with iPhone

  1. It over-emphasizes the first character when guessing your word, so the most common failures are when I have a typo as the first character, it guesses something completely different
  2. Auto-complete. I have no idea what triggers it but sometimes it just decides to use whatever it has in auto-complete when I’m just trying to keep typing. This is the second most common failure and commonly results in extra words

yeah, my android did better at predictive text than my iphone does. it refuses to recognize even the simplest proper nouns on many occasions.

Well yeah. I turned that shit off on day one of getting my phone. It doesn't even make you faster at typing? What's the point in having it enabled?

Now when I make typos at least it was me that made the typo

Oh I turn that shit off on literally everything because of how insanely bad it is, have been for almost a decade now.

Especially as multilingual it is a mess! It didn't use to be this bad!

It's worse when you are not multilingual! I am in Ireland and keep getting Spanish words predicted. I am not in Spain or California, why?

Dude... i've been thinking about your reply here a lot since you made it, and trying to understand. Why is it worse for you than for multilingual users?

Its not like i can use Spanish suggestions better than you just because i speak more than 1 language.

I dont even speak Spanish but even if i did, i couldn't use the Spanish suggestions when writing English or any other language

Unequivocally.

Mine didn't even know that word.

I'm not a native speaker, but somehow have a bigger vocabulary than my phone. Granted, I read a lot, but you'd expect my dictionary to, well, contain the entire dictionary. Some words, it recognises one form, but not others.

I'm still using Swype & Dragon, and it's as awesome as it was 12 years ago.

Apparently it's not working with Android versions >12 anymore, so I'll ride this phone until it dies on me.

i are, I generally have to make about the corrections per message in order for it to even be legible

(left it in all its glory for you guys)

I switched from Android to iPhone after they stopped making phones with QWERTY physics keyboards. I tried my partner’s iPhone and the screen typing was actually excellent. Now with HUGE version iPhones, it’s wayyyy easier for me.

I’m sure on-screen Android keyboards are VASTLY improved since then, but I don’t have any problems day-to-day shitposting all day

My transition from OnePlus 6T -> iPhone 12 Pro Max -> OnePlus 12 was the same, both times.

iPhone had really good type and haptics and predictive entry around that time...but over time I started to find it annoying. More and more often it would insist that the word I correctly entered 2-3 times is actually wrong.

I'm really happy with the keyboard on my new phone. Haptics are better, hit boxes are better, autocorrect is (generally) better, and it's pretty good about learning new words or fixing between its and it's and such.

I haven't noticed this, but I also have heavily curated my predictive text so that it doesn't even attempt to use uncommon words I won't use.

I feel you. T9 on my sidekick in 2008 was better than my current predictable text. At one point my screen was so broken that I was using maybe a 1/4" sliver of the screen to text, and text prediction was solid enough to give actual suggestions

Another advantage of T9 is that alternative words were offered in a consistent order, so the most common ones could easily be memorized along with the number of button taps needed to get there. This allowed me to reliably write messages without looking at the screen at all.

Yeah, the frequency with which swipe row will screen things up is just mending.

I've switched to Gboard on Android back in the days, when it was the only one with proper multilingual features, and been using it ever since.

I've experienced the opposite: I actually found it rather more helpful than not, despite the occasional errors like you mentioned. But nowadays it's quite rare that it "mispredicts" a word. And what I've found extremely helpful is, that nowadays it doesn't only correct individual words, but it picks up other grammatical errors as well in the sentence. So it's working for me.

I turned it off a long time ago when it started replacing entire sentences. So annoying!!

I still have the suggestions on but I might turn that off too because it keeps suggesting words in other languages even though I'm on the English keyboard and don't know much in any other language (and the only other keyboard I have is the Spanish one).

Also the dictionary doesn't have a shit ton of common words in it for some reason, so if I can't think of the proper spelling I have to look it up anyway. Which is also annoying because search engines suck and I never have a hard copy handy.

Ayo, whatever has been making recommendations for my next few terms in Visual Studio can go straight onto my phone, that shit is accurate 90% of the time it’s sometimes a wee bit concerning

You mean autocorrect and voice to text stuff and not AI, right? Because this is one area I find the AI to actually be good at while the non-AI versions are just garbage.

Predictive typing/autocorrect has a nasty habit of changing correct words to entirely different words that do not in any way fit with the context. And I know they look at context, since it will sometimes change a word I wrote 4 words ago when I no longer even notice because I'm looking where I am writing and not 4 words ago.

I despise autocorrect. Haven't used it in 10 years probably. Just a normal keyboard for me please

I'm a fan of HeliBoard now, it's not as good as gboard in it's word finding, but it's almost there. Good enough to switch away from Google by far.

Gboard is the best but yeah it being google sucks

Complete garbage. It has to have gotten worse. Like it’s training ai instead of trying to help us. I’m convinced

I keep hoping that its crapness will at least teach me to proofread before I hit the Post button. It hasn't... but I can hope.

I use the word "fuck" a lot. I have added it many times yet it insists on babying me and trying to protect my fucking feelings by not suggesting it. Infuriating.

i have a flip phone. i don't use sms, but occasionally i make a quick note in the little 'notepad'. the good ol' tap-tap-tap is more efficient than its horrible predictive text.

Iirc FlexT9 was ducking (nope, not fixing it this time, rofl) great for the... Galaxy S2?, but then Swype bought em out and it's been downhill ever since.

So... it's not that the tech is bad, it's that it's being hamstrung somewhere.

HTC had one of the best keyboards. Each key had 2 letters on each key (except 1 or 2 that had 3) and it never failed to guess what word I wanted. Stopped working with android 4 IIRC.

Found it on a XDA thread from 2010

Sadly still doesn't work

I dont like autocorrect both for privacy reasons (though there might be open source ones) and for accuracy reasons. I dont want something else to write for me what it thinks I want to say. (Hence I'm using a customized keyboard in florisboard beta which looks almost the same as gboard.😌)

People love to hate Rowling, but her descriptions of magic are very perceptive as predictions of computing.

Like in this case. Both Skeeter with her magic quill (LLM as it is) and the spell-checking quills (I think Ron liked that he could write much faster with those at first, so either he's as smart as a neanderthal, or they "improve" not only orthography).

And Snape's invented spells and how he doesn't really like their popularity remind me of script-kiddies.

I think I've read a fanfic where Hogwarts was converted into some kind of a "school for hackers" (in that early 00s spirit, think Lara Croft and Spy Kids movies). The universe was generally the same, only magic was replaced with that.

... What?

What what?

I really don't get people who express their inability to understand something without a specific question. As if being dumb were something to be proud of.

EDIT: Sorry, was thinking of an unpleasant thing.

This thread is about predictive typing and your post was so barely tangentially related as to be a non-sequitur. So again I ask: What?

and your post was so barely tangentially related as to be a non-sequitur

Which is your opinion, not accompanied with anything to help me care. Again, if a certain connection or association is real, but still feels out of place for you, then the problem is likely with yourself and doesn't concern me.

If it has the word auto in it i tend to disable, remove or uninstall it. I get frustrated by every half baked implemenation to predict, correct or actson my behalf.

The only thing i mostly tolerate is auto suggest in programming IDEs. But that is on thin ice. The second it hijacks the input system its done.

Since iOS 17, I have had no problems with text input. It feels better than anything that preceded it which I used on Apple or other platforms. That is true for swiping or typing and in either of the two languages I use. I’m actually blown away by how good it is sometime, correcting words based on the clause around it.

I also have an S10 Lite that I keep up to date. The native input there is okay, but not nearly as accurate.

TBH, Microsoft’s Swiftkey was pretty decent before they started adding Bing AI bullshit. I’ve since switched to Apple’s default keyboard and it’s painful.

That's my biggest pet peeve, when it auto suggests words that don't exist.

It’s a privacy issue. To predict, the service would have to get to know you better and there are privacy problems with that.

They just can’t seem to figure out a way NOT to be invasive. Go figure.

Oh what. Is that really why? Ffs this is one of the things I'll happily consent to

No,that's not why. 6 years ago these apps collected less data and worked better.

Hard disagree. I'm using g board, from Alphabet, which is about as concerned with privacy as a nudist exhibitionist with a shame kink. That is to say, privacy as a concept exists yes, but only to be perverted.

The only comfort is that I'm not the only one with random capitalization in my texts

I think the major problem is that culture is evolving so rapidly that keyboard dictionaries can't keep up with new words.