this post was submitted on 20 May 2024
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Why is predictive text so hard to disable? (beehaw.org)
submitted 5 months ago by friendly_ghost@beehaw.org to c/programming@beehaw.org
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Does anyone know, or can anyone guess, the business case for predictive text? On phone apps, it is often incredibly difficult to turn off. Why is that, do you think? (The examples I have recent experience with are Facebook and Outlook mobile apps.)

I would have thought that, for AI training purposes, they would want humans typing things and not just regurgitating canned responses. But apparently not?

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[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I have none of that on my phone, just plain old keyboard.

But the reason it's everywhere is it's the new hot thing and every company in the world feels like they have to get on board now or they'll be potentially left behind, can't let anyone have a headstart. It's incredibly dumb and shortsighted but since actually innovating in features is hard and AI is cheap to implement, that's what every company goes for.

[–] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's not new, nor is it AI. Predictive text suggestions have been in Android for ages now.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago

I think predictive text predates even Android and smartphones (but not exactly), when we had to press a key 3 times until specific characters appeared; called T9 and just a dictionary. Having or not having a dictionary suggestion was the difference between life and death. Now the modern smartphone has way more compute power and resources, therefore they can analyze text in more depth. It's just the logical next step to the plain and simple dictionary.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 1 points 5 months ago

See, it isn’t new and it isn’t AI, but it’s the same line of development as modern LLMs. They’ve just rebranded existing projects and lines of development as “AI technology” to be marketable.