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 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’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”.
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.
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.
it’s so good it sometimes even offers other people’s suggestions
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.😌)
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.
… What?
What what?
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.EDIT: Sorry, was thinking of an unpleasant thing.
This thread is about predictive typing and your post was so barely tangentially related as to be a non-sequitur. So again I ask: What?
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.
Actually using the arrows along with ctrl and shift is much faster than taking your hands off the keyboard and using the mouse. Would recommend
Swype typing still working awesome for me on Gboard.
What’s Gboard?
Edit: ugh, it’s google? That it’s own problem I’d like to avoid
It would solve two of your problems though, that’s a pretty good bargain.
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.
Oh what. Is that really why? Ffs this is one of the things I’ll happily consent to
No,that’s not why. 6 years ago these apps collected less data and worked better.
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.
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 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
It’s strange because it worked perfectly on older phones. Then smartphones came out and it became worse and worse over time.
Especially as multilingual it is a mess! It didn’t use to be this bad!
It’s worse when you are not multilingual! I am in Ireland and keep getting Spanish words predicted. I am not in Spain or California, why?
Dude… i’ve been thinking about your reply here a lot since you made it, and trying to understand. Why is it worse for you than for multilingual users?
Its not like i can use Spanish suggestions better than you just because i speak more than 1 language.
I dont even speak Spanish but even if i did, i couldn’t use the Spanish suggestions when writing English or any other language
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Voice typing is the only thing that suffers OP’s complaints in my experience.
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.
My experience with iPhone
- 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
- 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
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.
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.
