Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world Mastengwe @lemm.ee 4 mo. ago

What happened with the spell checker/autocorrect in iOS?

It’s abysmal garbage now. Was something changed about how it works?

29 comments

What’s worse is that disabling it in settings does not survive a restart.

Drives me nuts. Always makes me say things I didn’t Nintendo.
- I see what you did there.
- Imagine having a choice in an apple product
It went from (iOS 16 and earlier) never letting me type “fuck” and replacing it with “duck” instead to (iOS 17) suggesting and “correcting” what I type with wildly improbable words.
It's just Apple once again trying to copy something android has done for years and act like it's new.
- Give it a rest man. The war is over.
  
  EDIT: I get the joke now. Apologies!
  
  No that's funny. Android autocorrect has been garbage WAY longer than iOS.
I remember those memes from all those years ago (even from the skeuomorphic days of iOS; 2007-2013) where autocorrect can basically ruin a user's life.

I was an iOS user right until 2015, because I couldn't afford any of the new iPhones, and the old ones were really slow on the then latest version. I had an iPhone 4 at this point.

So I think I always remember iOS's autocorrect being garbage. Either it got better once I left and then suddenly got worse again, or nothing changed at all and it continues to be garbage without ever being good for a day. Can anyone else confirm this?
- I had an iPhone for work from about 2014-2018. Autocorrect was as you have said the entire time (ganache).
  
  Not sure what ganache has to do with this, but I actually didn't think someone else would relate to me this much.
Mine consistently changes human to “juman”.

That is not even a word.
Yeah. Noticed it being super bad. Also, it could be related to the previous issue of the keyboard typing letters multiple times randomly.
- Haven’t had the multiple typing thing happen. But I will say that just now trying to type the word “happen” I had to force it to not say “hammer.”
  
  Yeah. I tried installing gboard and it didn't help.
  
  "Carries" is a nightmare for me. It's not a rare word. Why does autocorrect think I'd ever want " Carrie's"? It's not like that's even a name in my contact list to influence it into ridiculous nonsense.
Sometimes resetting your keyboard dictionary can improve things (see last section): https://support.apple.com/en-sg/guide/iphone/iph6d01d862/ios

But yeah, I do feel like it's gotten worse
Happens on Android too. SwiftKey keyboard used to be the shit. I could sloppily mash out a message without even looking at my phone and it would autocorrect everything perfectly 98% of the time. Ever since Microsoft bought it about a decade ago it's been getting worse and worse. I can't type at all on this damn thing without looking directly at the keyboard like I'm still learning how to type. It's infuriating.
And here I thought it was just me. Glad to know I’m not the only one.
It uses LLM training. I find it to be a huge improvement, but understand that mileage may vary.
- You might be the only one that thinks it’s improved.
The only issue I’ve had is it loves to type “phine” instead of “phone” - I added this to text replacement and the problem went away.

“Fir” instead of “for” is still an issue sometimes but I just need to add that one as well. It doesn’t happen frequently enough for me to be bothered yet.

Other than that it works pretty well for me.
Oh it’s absolutely garbage. So far AI has only made things worse, including autocorrect.
I had to reset my keyboard once or twice a month for a while. Finally turned it off because it kept learning that words i often started sentences with should always be capitalized, even in the middle of a sentence. Spent a few weeks constantly correcting my spelling because i had grown heavily dependent on autocorrect, but it was worth it

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