Technology

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

T9 text worked wonderfully, and it's only gotten worse from there.

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.

I don't know what you're taking Abbott

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.

I'm sick and tired of wanting to type Mastodon and it keeps coming out as Masturbation! Thanks autocorrect!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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

"Tgat" is not that. It pisses me off!

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

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.

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 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.

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".

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