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