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 tried to swipe some word earlier and it decided what really wanted to say was ConocoPhillips. Why the fuck is that even in the dictionary in my phone? When would I ever want to say that?
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
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’ve finally had to disabled it. Been a few weeks and while typing is more of an effort on my part, it is also much less frustrating.
The predictive text was far and away the most annoying part.
Disabling autocorrect showcased how bad I am at phone typing. But I have to be very mindful of what is actually corrected and corrected to. Especially in sms where there’s no easy edit
At some point, “lets”, “well”, “ill”, “id”, and “its” (among many others) have stopped being words, apparently.
I don’t inderstand, my phone knows that when I type stormloght, what I really mean is Stormlowght instead. (This happened yesterday)
Auto carrot is amazing.
It seems to very a lot from phone to phone. My current phone is terrible. It “corrects” words I don’t want it to, and leaves in obvious typos.
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.
Or when it “corrects” a word I didn’t want, so I delete the part it changed and then type in what I want to say and it “corrects” it again into the same thing I just deleted. Satan could learn a thing or two from whoever invented that “feature.”
it varies per keyboard. you can install third party keyboard apps that offer different dictionaries and autocorrect capabilities.
Yeah like spelling vary as very.
I miss T-9 and physical buttons. I could type out War and Peace with maybe one typo without looking at my phone once. The on-screen keyboards we’ve had the last ~17 years have been a huge downgrade, IMO.
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.
For me, it averages out about the same / maybe a slight benefit for T9.
Yeah, I can type faster on a modern on-screen keyboard, but by the time i go back and correct typos, fight the cursor to get it where i want it, and double check that all the words i meant to type didn’t get autocorrected into something else, I could have typed the same thing with much better precision on a T9 style and have, at most, one word to fix.
It’s something of a tortoise and hare situation. lol
No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input, is was especially annoying when in the pocket because if you were going too quickly it was very easy to place 1 letter that was a combination of multiple letters.
Heavily rose tinted glasses you have there.
Also enjoy the 50 pixel per inch screen resolution, scroll-everything navigation, terrible Internet browsing, no video streaming, and incredibly proprietary (if any) internal media player. I’m not saying the swipe keyboard hasn’t begun becoming enshittified (which auto completes and is a brand new term) and it’s slightly annoying, but I would take today’s phone over 10 years ago, and 10 years ago over 20 years ago (even a full keyboard BlackBerry, or a t9) any day of the year and twice on leap day.
No, because words that use repetition of the same series of letters requires a delay between each letter input
only if you were typing letter by letter instead of using the built-in dictionary. you could just press 8-2-5-5 and it would offer both “talk” and “tall”, for example.
I miss the keyboard on the T-mobile G1.
i want my sidekick back. best form factor ever
Never had a Sidekick, but I had several phones with similar landscape slide out / flip open keyboards. Those were the days.
My current daily driver is about 8 years old (a OnePlus 3 that’s aged very gracefully thanks to LineageOS), but I do need to replace it soon. Looking at something like the Cosmo Communicator that has a full flip-open keyboard.
Never heard of planet computers until you mentioned the Cosmo Communicator. Their products look really cool!
im amazed at the fact i stopped caring/needing a more powerful phone 5-6 years ago. its just not a thing that matters anymore… theres no feature or processing speed i would need from a new device despite my phone bein 5 years old.
too bad the batteries arent replaceable as that actually is one of my only concerns.
I have needed a new phone every 2 for the last 6 years because my old one physically broke. Battery might be good, but the screen is cracked: new phone. My last phone quit recognizing the SIM, and so new phone it is. In theory I can buy the parts to repair the phone, but in practice either the parts are obsolete and not stocked, or I can get them special order from China if I’m willing to wait weeks and pay half the price of a new phone. Then hope I actually manage to get the phone together again.
I live in the US where we use many weird by world standards frequencies. I’ve looked into various repairable phones, (fair phone, pine phone), but I quickly realize I often travel in parts of the US where they won’t work. Thus I’m stuck with what my carrier offers. (Apple might be more repairable, but apparently more locked down)
Yep. This 8 year old phone does absolutely everything I need it to do (well, haven’t had to deal with AV1 videos yet, so software decoding those might show its age), but the battery is on its last legs.
I’d just replace the battery (involved but not too difficult), but I also want a newer phone with better support for some of the LTE bands near me. I figure 8 years is a good run for a smartphone as a daily driver lol.
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.
私はねこです。
それいぬをたべましょか。
🐕🐈🐈⬛
Fan of Palm Treo here.
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.
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”.
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.
it’s so good it sometimes even offers other people’s suggestions
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know, I’ve used Gboard for so long I don’t notice if it’s good or bad. I swipe and it almost always works first time, if not it’s got the word suggested.
If it gets stuck, I start typing the keys and it usually suggests what I want. Same if I get stuck.
Sometimes I use speech to text, which works about the same and often better. If I could master punctuation with it, I would use it all the time.
When I type on a full size keyboard, it’s shit and takes forever. The speed on mobile is one of the main reasons I try not to use anything else. I can type at about the same rate as I can think of what I want to say. Tapping my fingers, I would have forgotten what I wanted to say before I could finish typing it.
I’m really just typing now for fun and to see how many words I can get into a comment before it becomes dull.
But then again, I never was very good at typing. Maybe that’s why it’s so much faster for me with a virtual keyboard.
I have a major issue with Gboard where it’ll have a word suggested, I’ll see it, type the next letter in the word, then tap the suggestion. BUT it’ll have moved the suggestion from the middle to the side in favor of putting some random word in the middle and I’ll tap the wrong word because of that.
It’s so frustrating for it to move around like that.
Retrain your fingers! Seriously though, muscle memory is a big factor. Get out the habit of typing the next letter, if the word is there just use it. Iirc, this is how they beat speed typing records.
I’ve noticed it getting worse as well. It ducking sucks now.
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.
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.
Depends - I currently use Heliboard which doesn’t seem to have any problems as long as I stick to dictionary words.
Samsung’s keyboard sucks though - not only would it miss obvious typos, if you made the same typo often enough, it’d start learning the “word” and autocorrecting the actual bloody spelling to the typo!
(I had a habit of swaping the i and e in their, so of course Samsung decided “thier” was what I clearly meant to type)I haven’t noticed this, but I also have heavily curated my predictive text so that it doesn’t even attempt to use uncommon words I won’t use.
i are, I generally have to make about the corrections per message in order for it to even be legible
(left it in all its glory for you guys)
Gboard is alright.
I feel you. T9 on my sidekick in 2008 was better than my current predictable text. At one point my screen was so broken that I was using maybe a 1/4" sliver of the screen to text, and text prediction was solid enough to give actual suggestions
