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

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

Tin foil hat: Spy phone/app/browser looking at what you’re reading and adding it to your keyboard hints. That particular company was mentioned in a recently linked article about the company triggering an earthquake from fracking in northern BC, as well as being sued by the state of California.

It was totally to give you content to share today on Lemmy /s

I have wondered for a while if both the predictive and spelling 'help' these keyboard provide are getting broken because they're integrating "what most people do" to your phone.

autocorrect is like downright scary now. you have to double, triple check what you typed is what WAS typed.

I'd assume it was something you'd typed once (maybe while searching or a typo). I always delete those words when they come up (for me that's dragging the word up and a bin appears).

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.

it varies per keyboard. you can install third party keyboard apps that offer different dictionaries and autocorrect capabilities.

Yeah like spelling vary as very.

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'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".

it's so good it sometimes even offers other people's suggestions

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.

My experience as well!! Maybe it's not 100% accurate but it works well enough I can use it frustration free. Definitely hasn't gotten worse. My only complaint is since the ios 17 update it randomly switches back to the default keyboard until you close and open the text box again but that's not a predictive text problem.

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 miss the keyboard on the T-mobile G1.

i want my sidekick back. best form factor ever

I’m currently learning Japanese, and one of my favorite things right now is that the “normal” phone keyboard for Japanese is basically a t9 on steroids. It gives you this grid with huge buttons, you tap a letter or swipe in a cardinal direction to get a variant. E.g., the button will show か (ka) and swiping will get you く、け、こ、き (ku, ke, ko, ki).

It is super intuitive and with like a few minutes of training I was typing faster on it than my English keyboard (albeit with my very very limited vocabulary). The buttons are so large it’s hard to miss.

Fan of Palm Treo here.

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.

Swype typing still working awesome for me on Gboard.

This sounds like user error to me. Hold the spacebar, then drag your thumb to move the cursor exactly where you want it.

fire

Hahahahahhaahhaa

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.

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.

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.

Depending on the keyboard you use, you probably just have to enable profanities in its settings

I finally found the setting in the keyboard to delete the words it has learned so I stop getting the stupid typos it picks instead of actual words. Of course there was no list and I had to agree to delete all learned words which now means I will have to teach it again all of the words in another language that I use regularly.

Would have highly preferred going through the list and deleting the stupid typos it saved. I agree with you that it seems deliberate.

I'm on the Google Pixel and it lets me remove words from being suggested, and only takes me a few times tapping out a word to add it to my suggestions. I use swipe and it's only gotten better and better for me.

Yeah, have exactly the same problems as you, and they started once I switched from SwiftKey to Heliboard. I'm staying on this, because it's FOSS, but Swiftkey is better, in actually letting you remove words from the dictionary, not having that weird Tue thing.

Yeah I've been very happy with Gboard recommendations, I disabled networking for the app since I'm using GrapheneOS and it still does great. Even voice to text is scary good, just have to download the model before disabling networking.

Oh how I wish the same was true for languages other than English too… autocorrect has always been borderline unusable with my (granted, smaller) language, and this is true for all of the applications of autocorrect, be it android or iOS or whatever.

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 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"

That fuckin sockets

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 .

Google keyboard was even better that Swype back then. Only when they started trying to make it smarter by scrubbing all our text input did it start getting worse. However they need the pretense to collect all our input so they're never going back.

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.

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.

The problem is that LLMs require a considerable amount of computing power to run, unlike the simple markov chain predictions that keyboards use. You could use a cloud-based service like ChatGPT or something, but most people wouldn't want their keyboards to send all their keystrokes to a remote server... and even if they didn't know or care, the response time wouldn't be good enough for real-time predictions.

Now smartphone SoC makers like Qualcomm have started adding NPUs (neural processing units) with their latest chips (such as the SD8 Gen 3, featured in the most recent flagship phones), but it's going to take a while before devices with NPUs become commonplace, and it'll take a while for developers to start making/updating apps that can make use of it.

But yeah the good news is that it is coming, it's only a matter of "when" - I suspect it won't be long before the likes of SwiftKey start to take advantage of this.

For and fir for me as well.. when does anyone need fir??

Or and it and out

It worked great on Blackberry and earlier Samsung Galaxy S devices... How did they make it worse?

Damn that's egregious

Did you mean to type “off this reply”?

They do remember common words that you use

Sometimes your own peril... I keep getting my ex's name randomly when I'm swiping for another word 🤦‍♂️

I don't seem to have an issue with swiping on my keyboard either except for names and abbreviations/capitalisations but then all phone keyboards struggle with that except for T9 and blackberries. I think it's a small price to pay for such fast and effortlessly swiping for 99.9% of the time.

Man, I'm using heliboard and it has the same problems openboard had and the same problems gboard has with regard to autocorrect. And it's missing a lot of special characters, but I assume that's a work in progress.

You know what would really help the situation? You know how the spell checker underlines (or at least used to) incorrect words in red? It should underline corrected words in yellow or green or something. That way, when you're going over what you've typed, the autocorrected gibberish won't slip past you and will stand out. That would go a long way, but what would really improve it is if you could remove words from the dictionary that you don't use, and go back to however the system worked 6 years ago because it was pretty light on the frustration.

Hmmm, wonder why it needs side loaded? Why can they post to the Google store?

Edit: just installed it and f-droid, though. Super easy.

Are there no FOSS keyboards w/ a swipe feature? I really like it, but it really does suck sometimes.

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 got it to type fuck just now when I started swiping from g instead of f, so it wouldn't put a d. if yours is typing guck though, that probably won't work

Voice typing is the only thing that suffers OP's complaints in my experience.

yeah, my android did better at predictive text than my iphone does. it refuses to recognize even the simplest proper nouns on many occasions.

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.

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?

Another advantage of T9 is that alternative words were offered in a consistent order, so the most common ones could easily be memorized along with the number of button taps needed to get there. This allowed me to reliably write messages without looking at the screen at all.

Gboard is the best but yeah it being google sucks

My transition from OnePlus 6T -> iPhone 12 Pro Max -> OnePlus 12 was the same, both times.

iPhone had really good type and haptics and predictive entry around that time...but over time I started to find it annoying. More and more often it would insist that the word I correctly entered 2-3 times is actually wrong.

I'm really happy with the keyboard on my new phone. Haptics are better, hit boxes are better, autocorrect is (generally) better, and it's pretty good about learning new words or fixing between its and it's and such.

I've only ever used Gboard and I even turned off the predictive text and autocorrection features in the settings but it still changes words on me often.