This same AI effect can be seen in the Android keyboard, where _properly_ spelled words will be replaced after typing another word or two because it's been determined to be more likely what you want. It's infuriating.
I think what's happening here is that there's a very impressive and sophisticated heuristic for predicting the probability of what you want to type by looking at the frequency of what you have typed in similar contexts. It uses its state-of-the-art AI to evaluate the context and build an array of candidate words, along with their respective probabilities. I suspect it is very accurate as it does this. Then it sorts the array by probability and pops the top element into the predictive text input.
Alas -- per my pet theory anyways -- it sorts like this:
candidateWords.sort((a,b) => a.probability - b.probability);
candidateWords.sort((a,b) => b.probability - a.probability);
This works fine for me with GBoard. Are you drawing a little circle on the o to indicate you want the double letter?
I've specifically googled for instructions on how I might be expected to use the swipe-style keyboards, and turned up nothing.
edit: Don't actually see a tutorial in the app. Maybe I'm confused with another app such as Swype, but the same technique seems to apply to all.
The weird thing is that if I type nothing at all, the contextual predicted "next word" on GBoard is actually very good -- I wasn't praising it for comedic effect. But it really does seem like there's a sign error in a sort function which kicks in after you start typing.
And yet, when the latter inevitably breaks on an edge case, users can try to fix it themselves. They don't hit a wall of frustrated "I can't do anything", they hit a challenge that they are empowered to try overcoming. They already know what they want and can set things that way, rather than trying vaguely to teach a system (machine learning, hardcoded heuristics engine, department of humans making seemingly unconnected changes to a GUI with each passing version and no obvious plan) to understand their desires.
I miss the days when users were seen as intelligent professionals who are willing to change settings, create and re-dock an assortment of toolbars to every edge of every screen/window to suit their daily tasks, read a manual (or at least search the integrated help entries) to overcome problems. Rather than "busy" phone users who just want to complete a task with minimal time spent learning and get back to posting on facebook or whatever, and who accept the automagical solution because adequate results instantly are somehow considered better than great results with some work.
Ugh, that whole block of text just kept growing; I had better leave and go ramble/rant at trees or clouds or something elsewhere.
About it only replacing after you start writing, the probability of "son" must grow faster than the one of "soon" after you type "so". If there were such a huge bug, you would be seeing a new word every time, not always the same one.
The only thing it is confused about is the letter "i", which means "and" in Bosnian, and SwiftKey often capitalizes it where it shouldn't. Probably happens because I often mix Bosnian and English in the same message (instead of translating technical terms).
All my devices insist on shaming me (or autocorrecting me) for one of those spellings. At this point it feels like a complete gamble which I'll get corrected on. I'm just slowly getting used to correcting the autocorrect. :(
I'd love a feature to disable all that deep learning and AI and just use the algorithm they originally had (proximity of where you typed to words in the dictionary). That worked so much better.
I had a Galaxy S3 and was a heavy user of Swype. My friends marveled at how fast I could type with it. It was perfect! I recently changed my phone to an S8 and Swype became unusable. It gets almost every second word wrong, so much that I'm thinking of disabling it entirely :(
iOS keyboards have been getting worse with every update, probably as more and more engineers feel the need to make a mark, or are required to fix bugs, and they spoil it. The simple and predictable statistical model of the original iOS was better than what we have now. So much of iOS was better back then, IMHO.
When wages don’t grow over 10 years, what incentive is there to write the best software you can?
The majority of people don't give a shit. Correct spelling and obscure searches are not even on their radar, it's not a part of their reality. Don't let the comments here fool you -- it is a very specific, picky, technical crowd that frequents HN.
The voice of "those who care" has always been a minority, although it used to matter more, simply because people who care and worry and try to do a good job tend to have more power and money (conscientiousness is a great predictor of success), and so businesses cater to them more. Now that everything seems to be turning more uniform, more global, more binary, more equal, that voice is marginalized (good thing? bad thing?) -- you're seeing the effect of a hoi polloi stampede.
So it's not the fault of "incompetent programmers" -- it may be a trickle down effect of our social incentives and economic trade-offs.
To add to this, people who cares most powerfully had probably switched to alternative, open source, software solutions. This leaves the remaining group with less "care" on average so fewer would complain. Kinda like evaporative cooling.
I think another dimension is how deployability has changed.
Before... When you wrote and shipped software, getting your software out was a big problem, a big deal. This also meant that if you shipped a bug, shipping an update would be equally expensive (for you and your customers), and the amount of goodwill you lost would be quite tremendous.
Now everyone has a appstore, always up to date apps, and whatever else is usually "in the cloud" somewhere. The time of people installing applications in a normal desktop-context, with installers and having IT-administrators handle updates once every second year is surely long gone.
With that kind of change, and an increased focus on delivering early, doing proper QA is no longer something which is rewarded in the market.
Who cares if you made a bug-free, awesome service, when you did it 6 months after someone else shipped a similar, but buggy service which everyone is already using? They have established a user-base and as such already has social momentum and lock-in.
What do you have to offer which is not only fantastic enough to make some bother migrating, but also so amazing that these people will also go convert their friends and families? "Less bugs" alone is not going to cut it.
Basically, taking the time to deliver quality software these days is increasingly something you get punished for in the market-place.
The result? We get shit like this and we can only blame ourselves.
If enough people start suing or asking back for their money, companies will surely improve their QA.
Once you hit space and start a new word it’s game over.
Frequently happens at the worst moment when you’re trying to mash out a complex explanation in a rushed fury.
Honestly it's very probable that I'll only ever keep a smart phone around as a music/podcast/audiobook device.
As the saying goes, smart phones are just pocket computers with shitty phones attached.
I use Minuum - looks whacko at first but let's me use way more of the screen when replying and it is really accurate!
The corpora used for popular word embeddings are full of weird nonsense text (in the case of word2vec) or autogenerated awfulness like spam and the text of porn sites (in the case of fastText) or both (GloVe). And most people who implement ML don't care how their data is collected.
They say they welcome contributions; I don't know if they just mean new sources of text, or if this includes code for filtering or fixing their existing ones.
Or don't use a machine learning model. I honestly don't care, just don't automatically turn a correct "its" into an incorrect "it's".
Do publishers sell their published text as a mass for use in AI/ML? Like 1000 books, no images or frontispiece, etc., possibly jumbled by sentence/para/page.
Unfortunately I can't remember any examples at the moment, it's just something that happens to me every so often. They're really irritating though, because they aren't well expressed in the current autocorrect UI (which works on the current word) and it doesn't seem to get the hint when you go back and correct it, so it keeps applying it over and over.
How to I try the AOSP keyboard? I have a Google Pixel and it looks like my only built-in option is Gboard. I'm guessing they removed it.
There is SwiftKey, on the hand, that does those kind of annoying corrections a couple of times, remembers your choice, and does them no more. It's been a long time since I've seen a 'fir' with SwiftKey.
This is in the european market, though, I don't know if it's configured differently for different markets.
On google the query "samsung turn off keyboard autocorrect" provides links such as https://www.androidcentral.com/how-turn-and-autocorrect-sams... which may or may not be relevant to you.
Someone else suggested Swift keyboard, so I'm going to give that a try.