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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't know what you're taking Abbott

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

Permanently Deleted

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

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

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

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

Unequivocally.

Mine didn't even know that word.

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 so good at predicting text it is scary sometimes.

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

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'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'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 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

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

Gboard is alright.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

Join the revolution. Reject predictive text.

Thumb-Key

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

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.

Autocorrect is slave-mentality

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.

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.

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 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.😌)

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

SwiftKey is dope

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.

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