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Comment by Syonyk | Hacker News Reader

> I didn’t hate catching up with people over AIM nearly as much as I do over text.

You had a keyboard for that, too. Nothing is quite so annoying as trying to have a conversation with someone when one party is on a keyboard and the other is on a phone.

I'm just... "not online" a lot of the time now. Stuff will get to me when it gets to me, and if I've gone a couple days without being really on the various messengers, that's fine. Expectation is that if you need something critical, call, otherwise I'll get back to you eventually.

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It was a boon for me when I discovered voice recognition on my phone keyboard actually works well. I haven't been typing any messages since then. And my messages are also more clear since I'm not frustrated I'm wasting my time struggling with my large fingers on a little string doing something that could be done an order of magnitude faster with speech[0].

[0] Well, some of my friends are too lazy and actually leave me a voice message. I let them all know I prefer text messages and they can use the little microphone icon next to space for that. The only one who can communicate with me in this way is my partner, I actually like listening to their voice.

If your phone isn't too old, there's probably a setting where voice mails can be transcribed to text messages.

It's actually dependant on the carrier. In Canada most carriers will make you pay extra every month for visual voice mail, without that you don't get any kind of transcription. Some low cost carriers, like mine, don't even offer it.

Google voice does this for free (aside from what Google normally does with your data). Could forward voicemail there.

I've decided voicemail is a dead and obsolete technology and haven't had it set up in over a decade, but I do agree that hearing the voice of a loved one is nice, especially one that is no longer with us

It's pure vanity I guess - but I feel really stupid talking to my phone to transcribe a text message. I also feel like it's a huge invasion of privacy even if I would be saying "off to the store."

What does a keyboard help? With swiping and aggressive prediction and completion my wpm on my phone is basically on par with a keyboard. Hell on the average day I probably write 2x as much by phone as I do with a physical keyboard.

I don't have those and I don't feel like screwing around with the software setup for them.

If you write in English then yes for most people (peckers), if your write in any of the world's minor languages then hard no. Just no comparison.

Not same for many. Not for me. I hate iPhone keyboard and it is neither accurate nor easy compared to a physical keyboard.

I’m actually quite adept at my iPhone keyboard — one of many reasons I prefer the larger-sized phones. But I’m both actually faster (a solid 30 extra wpm) and feel less constrained when I’m typing on a full-size keyboard. There have been times I’ve been engaged in an active enough conversation by iMessage or by text that it motivates me to get out my Mac or my iPad for the benefit of the keyboard.

Oh god no. My keyboard doesn't have autocorrect and therefore doesn't fuck up my messages where I'm correcting the damn phone's keyboard mistakes 25% of the time, especially when you're multilingual and have to slip in local language words into a largely English conversation (common situation here in India).

I tweeted in jest about this and this is not even hyperbole. This literally happened while trying to swipe on my phone keyboard for "yesterday" - https://twitter.com/madmanweb/status/1513786589230493696

I've been using PC keyboards for 30+ years so it's just faster for me. I use Whatsapp (like most of my country) and prefer to have the desktop client open on my PC so I can type much faster and see everything on a larger screen.

i'm bilingual too, i just deactivated autocorrect. it's too frustrating

Weird, I use three languages on my phone for typing messages and the autocorrect manages that quite well (to my surprise, at first).

Even mixing languages works quite well in my experience. I use "Gboard" which I think is the default keyboard app? simply with all three languages enabled, and I don't switch keyboard (using always the same disposition, the one of my native language which isn't the language I type most on my phone).

I use three languages as well and GBoard is the only one that works flawlessly.

IPhone is unusable in this regard. Switching from one language to the other is just not cutting it. That's simply not how polyglot people communicate.

Unfortunately, Gboard doesn't seem to support multiple languages enabled at the same time if they use different scripts - you still have to switch languages.

I can kind of understand why, but I don't think it would be impossible to design a way for it to work.

Can you elaborate on this? I have three languages enabled on Android GBoard and it'll offer up completions and suggestions across all three languages even though I'm usually on English.

I'm talking about languages using different scripts/alphabet, e.g. Latin, Cyrillic, Greek etc. The feature you are describing ("Multilingual typing") is not supported in that case.

So for example, you can enable it for English and Spanish, but not for English and Russian. In fact, it doesn't even seem to be supported for different languages that use Cyrillic.

Ah, yep, all three languages I'm using are latin scripts, that explains it. Thanks!

iOS has support for mixed simultaneous languages but only in a certain small number of combinations.

If you avoid Google than you don't get access to their teams of ML data analysis.

> This literally happened while trying to swipe on my phone keyboard for "yesterday" - https://twitter.com/madmanweb/status/1513786589230493696

I used to frequently type "habe" instead of "have" (since V and B are right next to each other), and autocorrect would change it to "haberdashery"

Not sure how that happens.

…good for you?

Like, I absolutely empathize with GP. I’m typing this comment on an iPad, and in the previous sentence I hit the letter ‘m’ while reaching for the spacebar and didn’t realize until 3 characters later. I finished that sentence and realized it contained “thus” where I meant to write “this”. Then in that sentence I fucked up while typing “contained”. When I tried to do the swipe-down gesture to put stars around “that” I missed and hit the number 5.

Touch keyboards are a menace. Just because I can easily recover from errors doesn’t make them less annoying.

* I hit the letter ‘m’ while reaching for the spacebar and didn’t realize until 3 characters later*

Indonthisntonfuckingnmuchnandninreallynhatentryingntoncleannitnup. Exceptnitnisnalwaysn”n”ninsteadnofn”m”nfornsomenreason.

Swiping and prediction don’t personally get me to 100 wpm - a keyboard does.

Jay Leno had a funny segment on the Late Show where he pitted the Guinness World Record holder for texting against a morse code operator to send a message. It's on YouTube. Morse code was faster:

https://www.rfcafe.com/miscellany/cool-videos/jay-leno-tonig...

That seems to be a T9 layout on the texting one.

Which seems like an unfair comparison to todays phone keyboards. Still, I HIGHLY doubt that even todays phone keyboards come close.

I kind of love the idea that T9, which was created to improve texting speed, is slower than Morse which was more than 150 years old at that time.

Makes me wonder if there's a Morse code key with a USB or lightning cable. How annoying would it be trying to work in a Starbucks and the guy the next table over is tapping out a message via Morse? :)

Modern electric iambic keyers aren't that loud. You could probably also emulate with a touch screen.

I just switched to an iPhone a few months ago, and it literally _always_ autocorrects “well” to “we’ll”. Why would it correct one correct word to another???

just turn off autocorrect - it's a bug not a feature

I never understood all those autocorrect errors until I tried sending a text on my wife's iPhone a few years ago. The last word in the text was a word it really wanted to correct, and it corrected it when I hit send! I didn't realize what was going on at first and sent the same wrong message 3 times in a row.

Well … sometimes you’re trying to blast through typing and can’t be bothered to stop to type an apostrophe (try other contractions without apostrophe and you’ll see what I mean). In that case the auto expansion is helpful. But I agree it’s as likely to get it wrong as not :) which is annoying.

how I envy you. I commonly write in 3 languages with a seldom used fourth and my swipe keyboard prediction is all over the place.

It works nice 95% of the time, but the remaining 5%, you want to throw the damn thing at a wall in frustration for not reading your mind. I hate all forms of dictionary-based input and at this point I doubt it could ever get nearly as good as a real keyboard.

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