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Comment by jointpdf | Hacker News Reader

Setting aside all the other work Apple is doing in this area, can someone explain why iMessage autocorrect is unacceptably bad (to put it diplomatically) in the era of weapons-grade language models?

Its behavior is totally bizarre. It’s like an underpowered chess engine that makes flagrant blunders: capitalizing random words in the middle of a sentence (rock -> Rock), the context sensitivity of an actual rock, forcing the same correction multiple times (i.e. you go back to fix its error, and it defiantly repeats it), contraction mixups, blindness to off-by-one-keystroke errors (consentuallt -> <no action>), and of course the occasional random word substitution. Only martial artists want to duck people (and it—no joke—just now substituted [duck -> suck]. You had one job autocorrect.)

Is this just me? Is it actually 2020? What is going on?

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The one the drives me mad the most is when I type a word which it incorrectly autocorrects to a proper noun (which gets capitalised), I then use backspace to delete that word and type the - completely different - correct one, but it insists on upper-casing the first letter to match the original casing of the incorrect autocorrect. It really should keep track of the fact that it introduces the case-change and invalidate it when the automated action itself is invalidated. This happens frequently to me.

I can never make iOS write “Hong Kong” when swipe-typing; tried setting up forced text replacement entry (kong->Kong) to zero effect. It is always “Hong kong”.

iOS always capitalizes Hong Kong properly for me, but I write that so much that I guess I could have trained it.

Edit: I also bought all of my iOS devices in Hong Kong so, there's that.

I corrected it hundreds of times so it had plenty to learn from. If you don’t have this bug when swipe-typing then I guess it’s much less likely to be fixed for me in an update, oh well.

Bought my iPhone in HK as well, double physical SIM slot is a must have!

Most other devices I bought elsewhere, except for those I was dead sure I’m going to keep. As far as I can tell HK is the only place in the world where Apple retail has a no returns policy.

> As far as I can tell HK is the only place in the world where Apple retail has a no returns policy.

Yeah, we can thank the x-border gray market for that. In the beginning it was...flexible, in that if you obviously weren’t a smuggler they’d quietly accept the return, but I haven’t needed to test that in a while.

Similarly I can never get iOS to type “Kings Cross”, it always forces “Kong’s Cross” even when I delete the word and retype.

PS: iOS just did this twice while typing this reply.

iOS for me always autocorrects king -> kong, and I don't understand why. What even is "kong," and who says it more often than "king"??

I think you also have to signal iMessages when it got it right by sending the message. I tried a lot of times teaching it how to write Hong Kong and when it got it right, I sent the message. From that point onwards it always writes Hong Kong correctly.

Weird - just tried it and ir capitalised it correctly. I'm on the ios14 public beta, though.

That’s good news! I’m on iOS 13, wasn’t able to find a way to install the beta yet (not a registered iOS developer myself).

It seems to conflate people's names with words in a sentence, e.g. "I'm crossing the Bridges." Could just be confirmation bias, but whenever I notice that problem it tends to be a name in my address book.

Reminds me of how it capitalises "El Niño" as if I was talking about that climate thing, when I'm just trying to say "the kid" in Spanish.

Interesting. I was going to suggest that was from using the English rather than the Spanish keyboard but I just saw my iPhone do that on the latter as well.

I know exactly what you mean! This is even more annoying in German, where every noun is capitalised.

Why would it be more annoying? Seems like it would be harder to notice this error in German.

It's more annoying because when you type a non-noun there is a higher chance that it gets mistakenly autocorrected to something capitalised (as every noun in German is capitalised versus only proper nouns in most other languages). I hate this flaw of iOS as well.

Got it

Many teams at Apple are pure junk. When Steve Jobs basically fired iCloud folks in public, lot of people thought he went too far but little they knew how bad that team really was and still is. These folks are now center of the Apple universe but can't build a simple app that can efficiently sync the photos on Windows. Other teams are iTunes (one of the worst widely deployed Windows app ever), Apple Music (just look at the obscene UX - in 2020), App Store (good luck deleting installed app if you have too many of them - in 2020) and of course auto-correct (fails to fix spellings in 2020 that MS Word 2000 used to fix!). Surprisingly these folks have kept up with mediocracy regardless of otherwise stringent culture at Apple.

As incredible as it is, the problems extend way beyond just syncing on Windows.

Sync works completely randomly on mac between the iPhone and and OSX, - you often have to wait "a long time", and since Apple also has the completely idiotic concept of "everything has to be magic" you never get an estimate, or an error message, or a progress bar, so like everything on a mac, you have to just fiddle, disconnect, reconnect, wait, and just hope and pray that things will work out.

And then we haven't even touched on the their productivity apps like Numbers and Pages which for a long time had features in the templates which weren't available in new documents, so you had to start from a template, completely insane.

Still use Mac and like it for the most part compared at least to Windows which can't even get search right without showing randoms ads and internet results to you - another pretty crazy thing to push to production for a billion people.

Drives me crazy how unreliable all file sharing is on Apple devices. Like you said you can’t rely on iCloud sync, but half the time even AirDrop doesn’t work. Two devices sitting next to each other and AirDrop shows up on one but not the other. I put them both in Airplane mode and then back on, and now neither of them shows up. Oh wait now it works on one again, but again not the one I need to send from.

I actually meant airdrop in my comment above (although it does apply to airplay too) it applies to everything Apple does really.

Airplay is in the same category - it either works and is great, or just dead in the water and it's tough luck.

I once mentioned the rapper xxxtentacion in a text message. Now whenever I sign of an email or text to my wife with an ‘x’ iOS decides that what I actually meant to do was write ‘xxxtentacion’ and I’ve normally pressed send before I notice. After a couple of years now this is just how I talk to my wife.

I’m going to blame typing ‘sign of’ instead of ‘sign off’ on autocorrect.

For me IOS consistently suggests phrases I've used with my wife in the context of my colleagues despite me really never having addressed them "Hi honey" or "Hi darling" ... etc.

It's just pathetic nonsense to congratulate anyone on this level of nonsense.

One of my exes has a name that is very close to the word “the.” Her name has embarrassingly showed up, capitalized and everything, in way too many conversations. Apple has permanently turned me into that guy that can’t stop talking about his ex.

You can go to the reset menu in settings, and reset your keyboard dictionary.

It resets the entire thing though.

I recently discovered a neat trick for fixing the duck problem, that is, adding swear words to the iOS dictionary: add a contact with the chosen words in the name fields. E.g. I have a contact named "shit shitty fuck fuckin fucking oh shit"

I find it both amusing and ridiculous that you have to go to such great lengths to be able to type a good swear word on the iphone.

This sort of 'nudge' is stupidly passive aggressive and frankly condescending and infantilizing.

Companies should really just grow the fuck up and stop doing stupid, cutsey things like pretending adults really just typo a reference to a bird regularly.

St least Gboard let's you turn an option to allow "potentially offensive words" or something like that. I'm surprised it doesn't seem to exist on apple devices

The reason iOS type correction is so piss-poor is, to me at least, because it is not a 'typing' correction mechanism, it is pronunciation correction system. It bases it's auto replace on what the letters appear to be saying or sound like, and NOT, as it should, which would be simply and effectively based on typos on a qwerty keyboard. That is why. And it is like this because Apple want to steal your voice and 'preferred' you to talk, not type. Add to this no 'rude' words, even though you're an adult. Duck Apple for this alone!

I would leave iOS solely for this reason if it were not for the fact that Google are as bad.

The T9 input system is better.

The weird part is in my experience their "swift" input works miles better than the regular tapping. It's truly odd. Tapping I have to correct the phone all the time, while using swift (with the same keyboard!) I quite rarely do.

Is 'swift' 'swipe to type'? Yes, I find swipe to type surprisingly more efficient than the 21st century's first attempt of tapping on glass.

Yes, it's the swiping keyboard, sorry didn't quite remember the term.

I got it wrong too. It's Slide to Type. But we both knew what each other meant, that's the main thing.

Is it actually 2020?

Yes, but if it's not even possible to get auto-rotate to function correctly most of the time (to the point it becomes funny, countless are the times I've seen people yell at their device because either it doesn't rotate when wanted or rotates when not wanted), how do you expect something way more complicated to function appropriately? Only partially kidding here; this isn't criticism of the fact autocorrect doesn't work as good as it should, it's just that it's really hard to solve, but the point of failure imo is that there are other ways not involving AI or ML which might, as long as the former doesn't work better, actually be better suited and lead to results faster. E.g. something as simple as just adding anything ever typed to the dictionary and sort by number of usages - eventually getting rid of items with only one usage ever assuming they were typos or so. Which is roughly how phones used to do it pre-full-keyboard-era, I assume, and at least for me that actually worked pretty well and definitely with less mistakes. Maybe not as fast though. But I'm personally not interested in trading correctness for speed.

No kidding about one out of every 10 times I open my iPad Pro connected to the Magic Keyboard, it turns on the screen in portrait mode. It really should be smart enough to know you can’t use a Magic Keyboard in portrait mode. So now I have to tip my entire laptop on its side to get it to switch back and I look like a dumbass because Apple can’t fix their rotation.

To change rotation on iPad and keep it locked you have to do 7 steps:

-swipe down the settings panel

-unlock rotation

-reorient device

-swipe up the settings panel

-let it reorient

-swipe down the settings panel

-lock rotation

The only think I ever want to rotate is videos.

I NEVER want to rotate the home page. NEVER

This also happens to me on Android. Working in ML, this is something to point to when people hype it up. We've come a long way, but we still got a long way to go.

As for specific errors, does rock capitalize when "the" is before it? (The Rock) The models learn from how users write. But when you think about it, it is actually fairly difficult to predict what words are going to be, you can test it with your friends. Have them create a sentence and feed you one word at a time. The better you know the person the better you'll do, but I'm guessing you still won't be that good.

Predicting subsequent words is hard for humans, but correcting typos is easy. I've turned off autocorrect completely because my typos are always immediately decodable to their human audience, moreso than Apple's seemingly random modifications.

The most disruptive errors are those that could seemingly be cleaned up with some simple rules (e.g. if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it). This doesn’t seem like a “state of ML” issue—the Gmail text completion is annoyingly good, and you-know-who can compose soliloquies and smut with uncanny skill.

And no, I don’t often discuss The Rock, but if I did (“Do you smell what the r...”) I'd expect it to finish the alley-oop. I do not want to go Rock climbing.

iMessage is software that is used <Carl Sagan voice> billions and billions of times a day, and half the time it feels like verbal jiu-jitsu (“jiu-hursuit” according to autocorrect just now) with Dory the fish.

It isn't just you that affects the learning.

> if the word is in the dictionary, then don’t change it

Actually the thing that bugs me the most is that when there's a word that is in the dictionary that's long and complex and it doesn't suggest it, even when I have the right word. It just isn't underlined red. Or a one off error with these words and it has no idea what I'm trying to spell.

They have a long way to go. These systems aren't just ML btw.

Could autocorrect not wait until it sees more of the sentence?

Having to monitor several words back to fix errors that the system adds is exhausting. I wish I could turn it all off, or at least revert to the system from the early days of iOS.

Android autocorrect does this and it's maddening, because it's very bad at it, and now you don't notice the word it changed because you're looking at the subsequent one.

The swipe keyboard is atrocious too, I simply cannot swipe the word ‘you’ with any reliability. It becomes tut, or töre. Töre. Instead of the second most common pronoun in the entire English language.

Somehow swiping keyboards have gotten worse since the original launch of "swype" a decade ago. It's gotten terrible after they were bought by Nuance, and none of the alternatives match up to what it once was.

I'm bilingual and write approximately the same amount of messages in both languages using iOS. Autocorrect always suggests words from BOTH languages mid sentence. Like what the hell, they should be able to infer which language I'm using just from the first word.

This also happens on Android if you have several input languages enabled.

It looks like it uses all the dictionaries so suggestions appear from all languages for every word you're typing.

The Swype app used to be so much better at this, but Google had to go and buy it, retire the product and absorb none of its algorithms into Gboard. Such a loss.

I feel your pain.

On a day to day basis I do use 4 different languages, sometimes even mixing them in a single conversation (i.e the other person is bi/trilingual too). For me the autocorrection is only a distant dream and will probably remain so for a long time.

That sort of makes sense. I am not sure of it's prevalence, but at least for Indians, it's pretty common to code switch while writing (even more so while speaking).

Yes, I only speak one language fluently but I'll still arbitrarily code switch sometimes.

Human language is actually just one vast system, it isn't best understood as a bunch of nicely compartmentalized independent languages. So in a way it would actually be more wrong for an AI model to insist that "Beacoup money" isn't a reasonable thing for the user to want to write, just because those two vocabulary words don't co-exist in a single defined language. The user may or may not know that, but they certainly don't care.

I write three different languages on a daily basis, and I've always had autocorrection switched off because it has never worked for me. Also, how is an autocorrect supposed to know whether you are writing a technical term / acronym / etc and not an actual word?

My favourite iMessage ‘feature’ is how now and then it picks a real word and refuses to let me use it without autocorrecting it to something else.

Ah, my favorite is autocorrect changing `its` to `it's`. Makes my grammatically correct sentences incorrect :-)

Oh this one gets on my nerves so much! And when you go back to correct it, it still tries to “correct” you the second time around.

Yeah I recently moved to Menlo Park and for some reason after I type “Menlo” (which it correctly capitalized automatically), it always suggests random words like “this” or “it”.

Sure, some people would say “I went to Menlo for lunch today”, but it should always have the option of “Park” (which when I type it, it always knows to capitalize).

> ... in the era of weapons-grade language models?

Just an aside: Although common perception is that "weapons-grade" refers to the highest quality, in reality it refers to the lowest-possible quality that meets the bare minimum requirements!

So? That’s what every standard means: “anything just barely over the minimum that the standard specifies”. That can definitely be wonderful and impressive if the standard is high to begin with.

You might as well refer to the bronze medal as “just barely enough to be in the awards ceremony”. Is that supposed to be clever somehow?

> Is that supposed to be clever somehow?

I thought the parent comment was mildly interesting. There's no need to be so combative.

Pointing out tautologies that only sound convincing because of misleading phrases, isn't interesting.

You aren't the gatekeeper of what can and can't be considered interesting.

FWIW, your comment above (about standards) was also mildly interesting to me. I hadn't really given the phrase much thought.

There was no need to be rude about it though.

I'm not the gatekeeper, no, but I can alert you to when you're being duped by someone parroting nonsense.

Great! Just try to do it without being condescending (especially when the comment you're replying to is completely innocuous).

Those weapons grade language models take hundreds of gigabytes of storage. But yeah, after downsizing to a few dozen MB they should still be better than what's there currently.

I've recently switched back to iOS and hoped this behaviour was temporary as it got to learn my swiping style. Gboard on Android is almost perfect.

There's also a Gboard for iOS. Can't compare it with the Android version, but it is much, much better than the Apple default keyboard for swipe typing. Has become my default keyboard after Swype was discontinued, with a short stint in between into Apple's standard keyboard right after they added swiping.

To be fair, the android keyboards (like Gboard, googles own) are also bad. It's a tough problem for sure, but they haven't gotten better for the last 6-7 years at least, in my experience, and that is the point of the parent post I guess.

Is this true? Lately I noticed a change. Autocorrect now suggests based on previous words. I am not sure this use to be the case.

For example if I type "this is not the" it suggests the next word might be "case".

Gboard is not perfect and shows some erratic behavior described by the parent poster, but it isn't as bad as Apple's keyboard in my experience.

However, SwiftKey might be more conservative and feels a bit slower at times, but its autocorrect and prediction do a really good and consistent job.

The worst thing for me is that I frequently miss the space character and type a period instead, and Gboard can't understand that it's a mistake AND won't autocorrect and suggest words for what I'm typing after that period.

This whole thread is why I always switch off auto-correct on any device. Mixing two languages is horrible. Unusual words / slang / abbreviations / street names / any unknown word throws it off. It's just painful to correct auto-correct, and the amount of facepalming involved.

Plus, I feel like my ability to type things correctly might suffer from crutches like this.

The same goes for voice recognition, when it tries to squeeze a specific name into a set of common words. It's just bizarre. In the past, when I tried the Google voice assistant or Siri, I always had to bring my best american accent (almost comical), otherwise they would often not understand.

“may” -> “May” will be the death of me.

Compare Google and Apple's privacy policies. Autocorrection and autocompletion is far easier if you're willing to hoover up vast amounts of user data to train your models and provide personalisation. It's a similar story with Siri and Google Assistant.

Are you saying this is an unsolvable conundrum? You can't have good autocorrection with massive privacy violations?

I'm not sure I believe that.

> I'm not sure I believe that.

So, what would make you believe it?

Someone making a cogent argument in favour of it?

They have been actively moving to federated learning and analytics so far less data leaves your phone:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/05/federated-analytics-collab...

Same here, it’s painful and actually seems to get worse the more I use my phone. I’m pretty sure it capitalises words found in your contacts - fine for surnames, very annoying for Home, Bank etc.

> What is going on?

I have no idea what is going on, but the answer is installing SwiftKey

So now everything you type is also sent to Swiftkey servers ...

Fwiw Swiftkey was a paid app a few years ago. Then they became free. How do they still earn money to keep the company running ?

(I always had an Android phone but I assume it's also free on iOS)

Swiftkey was bought by Microsoft, they don't need revenue anymore. Or maybe they do?

IIRC that's actually a setting you can opt out of, though the wording in the app settings is pretty ambiguous

Not only that but it got worse after iOS10/11.

Same experience with gboard on iOS.

I’ve found it’s much easier to disable autocorrect altogether and simply take responsibility for what you type. I mean that with no snark; that’s actually how I view it. Over time you definitely improve at typing if you disable it.

I have rather petite hands and fingers, I should note.

I’ve been typing on iOS devices for more than ten years and I don’t think I’ve ever typed a single sentence without errors (even after autocorrect, which thought I typed decides instead of devices up there).

I find it’s easier to mentally parse typos than it is to parse the wrong autocorrect word.

> Is it actually 2020?

I think you found the problem

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