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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

Swipe typing appears to substantially worse now than it was 10 years ago.

In that sentence, "typing", "now" and "then" all needed correcting from the first guess, and in this one also "sentence" and "correcting".

All this AI and they can't predict a word from a set of nearby keys?

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I think all research into it is dead after trying to use AI and they don't care that it's a little broken.

iOS was extremely behind Android for years by refusing to allow different keyboards, Swype closed down as a company, and Swiftkey stopped trying after Microsoft bought and integrated them.

It's definitely the fastest way to type English on a phone but companies seem to have extracted all money they can get from it and don't really care about the tech anymore.

Not sure which swipe keyboard you are using, but the default iOS implementation is terrible.

Google keyboard is orders if magnitude better (and handles multilingual situations much better as well).

I don’t think the iOS one is too terrible. I use it with autocorrect turned off. Predictably, it gets worse the faster I swipe, so I’ve found that it pays to slow down and be slightly more precise.

It got every word in that comment correct (although I had to change “to” to “too”).

But apparently it still has that problem where "if" stands in for "of" even though a trivial evaluation of the relative probability of "orders if magnitude" and "orders of magnitude" would favor the latter. Why don't these keyboards look around a bit to select the best fit?

It depends on which keyboard you're using. I'm using the Google keyboard and it's pretty advanced: i typed this comment with it, and only corrected the word "typed" which showed up as "tired"

I'm using GBoard.

Suggesting "tired" there is clearly probably nonsense ("I tired of something" is not a very common expression, even if grammatical), if it had a choice between "tired" and "typed" in that context, having just typed "keyboard", only one is likely to be intended.

The best swipe-typing I've ever used was on my Windows phone of five or six years ago. GBoard is so-so, Apple's is terrible, and--what's really odd to my mind--SwiftKey is pretty bad, too, despite belonging to the same company behind Windows Phone.

SwiftKey keeps telling me how many presses I'm saving by using SwiftKey. Does that count all the delete, retry, delete, retry, delete, give up, type manually-cycles I'm doing? It's slightly better than having to type by hand but it still feels like having both hands tied behind my back and typing with my nose. I can't even get through one short sentence without deleting and retrying several times on some words...

“Swiping seems to be substantially better now than it was ten years ago.” (Typed using swipes on iPhone)

I had to correct ‘bite’ to ‘now’.

I don’t use swipe typing so I haven’t practised.

I really do feel that even a half-cooked statistical model of English, let alone one with any awareness of grammar, would be able to figure out that "now" is far more likely after "to be substantially better" than "bite" would be.

same. these days it seems the only way i can avoid mistakes is to swipe slowly

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