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?
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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
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.
I don't think the above poster has ever typed ConocoPhillips (hey it's on my autocorrect too)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 knows what you really want.
You think that's bad? I for one am sick of going onto pornhub and my searches being "femboy Mastodon"
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.
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.
Yep swype around 2010-12 was the golden age of this stuff. I distinctly remember being on a bus commute being amazed how quickly I could pump out work emails, and documents on way to work on maybe an LG android smartphone with no manual invention required on spelling or grammar. Ancient times. Just typing out this comment on mobile in 2024 I’ve had to recorrect every 4th to 5th word , either I mistyped and it doesnt autocorrect correctly , or its autochanging correct words to wrong ones. I have big fingers but the phone is the higgest I’ve had. Clearly these enshittertech corporations dont make money from making better or more useful products .
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.
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’ve noticed it getting worse as well. It ducking sucks now.
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)
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!
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.
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 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".
Settings > Text Correction, uncheck third option down "Block Offensive Words"
Fuck fuck fuck cunt bitch asshole (all swipe texted, only the first "fuck" became "duck")
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 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.
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