Asklemmy

Part of a strange, larger trend where things get worse as technology advances.

autocorrect, search engine results, google now -> assistant, voice recognition.

All of those seemed to be much better a few years back.

1000%.

I’ve noticed across platforms, posts, texts, etc.

My guess is that there’s been a slow infiltration of “AI powered” autocorrect across the industry.

Other than that, I don’t really have a good answer to the broad, sweeping degradation of autocorrect.

But you’re definitely not the only one.

Along with search and many other things. Probably most of theur devs are optimizing user distraction and ad click rate, instead of... basic functionality 😐

Definitely been noticing that. I thought it was only me...

Glad it's not just me thinking that.

For some reason, half the time I try to swipe "because" it comes out as "beefsteak". No idea why and it's really annoying but I can't remove beefsteak from my swiftkey dictionary because I love tomatoes.

Now that you mention it, yes. I used to be able to just swipe without any problems, but now I only type letter-by-letter when I'm texting someone from work.

Why, you may ask? My phone has this odd tendency to try and insult my boss/coworkers when I swipe text. I don't insult people in other places, but my phone seems very eagar to literally call them things like "wimp", "loser", "hoe", etc. I don't want to get written up, so every letter is now typed individually. I've had way too many close calls lmao

On a similar note.. I haven't been able to find an open source keyboard for Android that has swiping. Anyone know of one maybe?

YES. It's so frustrating now. And Gboard suddenly keeps trying to turn every word I type that starts with a "p" into "poo apper". Wtf.

Not sure about that but in my native language the words for "if" and "poop" are spelled the same, so every time I type "ако" I get the 💩 as a suggestion.

It probably doesn't contribute much to the discussion but I felt compelled to share.

Edit: also "правя" which translates as making/doing (i.e making dinner, doing everything possible" automatically suggests "sex" and "blowjobs" despite me never sexting...

Absolutely. In the past few years Gboard seems to prioritize more generic words rather than the ones I'm typing. Not sure why. I still miss the Swype keyboard.

Every damn time I type “for”, it auto corrects to “fir”. I’m about to blow a gasket.

I just want my phone to stop changing its to fucking it's. Goddammit, stop fucking changing a valid word to something else.

I've been noticing it for years. Back when I first started using Swype and then Swiftkey you could vaguely swipe the word somewhere close on the keyboard and it would be correct, then I had to keep resetting the predictions every few months when they got bad. Eventually that stopped working and would make weird suggestions even when super careful. I switched to GBoard which was a bit better but the predictions seem to be getting worse there as well.

I disabled autocomplete on my iphone a long time ago because it kept replacing valid words with their opposites

Example will to won’t or love to hate. Seriously.

Yes, it was unusable on my work tablet this week. Just making up weird ass words that make no sense. Division kept becoming driven like 20 times

Yes, Swiftkey became total garbage so I went for something completely different with https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key and like it so far. Takes some time getting used to but it's a neat way for input.

ladies and gentlemen, behold the new ai revolution!

People use autocorrect?

It was better when I turned it off :)

Actually, yes. I uninstalled Gboard and went back to Samsung's keyboard but it doesn't help much

Nah, I'm using AnySoftKeyboard and have had no problems.

However, it wouldn't surprise me if other keyboards are implementing AI autocorrection... causing you guys issues.

I had thought it was because I got a new phone or because I reset the dictionary... but not having an option to stop the damned thing from correcting NUMBER INPUTS is absolutely infuriating. When typing in various lengths of lumber needed, I do not need a 60 to suddenly become a 50 without me noticing.

Aside from that, sweaty leg typing has made an absolute mess of my dictionary and there's no function to edit "added words". So I'm not sure if the auto correct has gotten worse on its own, or if it's just a symptom of user error on my part.

I'm still using swype, so I haven't seen a lot of it since I only use gboard when I have no other choice. But, yeah, they're using humans to train their ai. By humans, I mean the people using the keyboard.

No change here, but I’m using an iPhone.

I wish there was a phone keyboard with the backspace key is higher up. Ive been using touchscreen keyboards for over 15 years and still cannot convince my thumbs thats theres no bezel at the bottom.

I wish i could customize a keyboard for how my thumbs want to type. Itd look weird, but qwerty is weird in todays age anyway.

Even if the numbers could be on the bottom row below the spacebar, that would be a game changer.

For iPhone I always feel like autocorrect was better 5-10 years ago but maybe just a selective memory (the past is rosy). Seems like in my memory you could just type without looking at the keyboard and it would all be fine. Sometimes nowadays it tries ti correct based on context or grammar but sometimes it makes no sense and you have to force it to say what you mean. I clearly typed fucking, hitting the wayyy right side of the f away from the d as possible but how many times will apple correct to ducking…several. Several times.

I just sent a friend this very question. Tusks for the good suggestions! Moved to Open board + swipe and it sends great.

On iOS? Yes, it's gotten to the point it's almost unusable. Supposedly, iOS 17 is going to address this but I've not tried the beta to confirm.