this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2024

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

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

... What?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

and your post was so barely tangentially related as to be a non-sequitur

Which is your opinion, not accompanied with anything to help me care. Again, if a certain connection or association is real, but still feels out of place for you, then the problem is likely with yourself and doesn't concern me.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.😌)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Join the revolution. Reject predictive text.

Thumb-Key

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

It would be slow as fuck though if you want it in real time typing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Takes too much energy(wattage used by gpu/cpu) to get decent AI results compared to current predictive text methods

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Gboard is the best but yeah it being google sucks

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah, I've used swipe typing for a really long time myself, and was forced to switch to GBoard when Swype was discontinued, and I can't even begin to express how much better Swype was and I would switch back to it in a heartbeat if they came back and updated it. The accuracy was way better, going back to previous words showed you the same alternate options so you could just keep going and go back to correct when you were done... And probably best of all, it gave more than just the three alternates so it was way rarer that it didn't have the word you were looking for. Even just typing this, I'm having to stop after pretty much every word to make sure it's giving me the right thing, which slows me way down.

Typing on phone could be so much better. It was so much better.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unequivocally.

Mine didn't even know that word.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Damn that's egregious

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Neither can I.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

I don't know what you're taking Abbott

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