Submitted 2 weeks ago by HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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?
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.
Yeah like spelling vary as very.
I’m feeling very I’ll.
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 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.
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”.
it’s so good it sometimes even offers other people’s suggestions
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.
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 accuracy on a T9 style.
It’s something of a tortoise and hare situation. lol
I miss the keyboard on the T-mobile G1.
i want my sidekick back. best form factor ever
Never had a Sidekick, but I had several phones with 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.
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。
Fan of Palm Treo here.
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.
fire
Hahahahahhaahhaa
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.
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
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
T9 text worked wonderfully, and it’s only gotten worse from there.
Predictive text is literally the one thing LLM AI would be the best at, and for some reason we don’t seem use it for that.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I’ve been very happy with Gboard recommendations, I disabled networking for the app since I’m using GrapheneOS and it still does great. Even voice to text is scary good, just have to download the model before disabling networking.
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.
I don’t know what you’re taking Abbott
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 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’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.
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 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.
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.
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
I’ve noticed it getting worse as well. It ducking sucks now.
I sideloaded HeliBoard on Android via F-Droid and the predictive text is coming along nicely the more I type.
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”.
“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.
frickineh@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I tried to swipe something 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?
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 weeks ago
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.
dmtalon@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
It was totally to give you content to share today on Lemmy /s
otp@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
At some point, “lets”, “well”, “ill”, “id”, and “its” (among many others) have stopped being words, apparently.
KnightontheSun@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
aStonedSanta@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Yeah. Kinda like an LLM lmao
chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.net 2 weeks ago
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.
Deebster@programming.dev 2 weeks ago
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).