Ask HN: Why is mobile keyboard completion so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is mobile keyboard completion so bad?

5 pointseslaught9 comments

Hi HN,

This has been bugging me for a while. We've got things like GPT-3 that can apparently create text out of whole cloth, and tools like Google Docs that provide the ability to complete sentences with the context of previous words before you even type the next word. And yet the swype-style completion on my smartphone continues to be consistently terrible.

As an example, just moments ago I was trying to type "about", and none of the completion options started with "a" or ended with "t", let alone resembled the semantic meaning of "about". And this is not an infrequent occurrence for me; I probably get at most 85-90% accuracy on a good day. That means I'm missing a word almost every sentence, and the typos are so far off from what I intended that I often don't even remember what I intended if I don't stop immediately to fix them.

Maybe I just type poorly, but I'd think even a relatively poor input (with the context of previous words) would be good enough to make a pretty accurate keyboard.

Does anyone else have this experience? Any ideas why the state of practice isn't more advanced at this point?

For reference: I'm on a Pixel device with stock Android keyboard, fully updated. But my experiences have generally been similar on other devices I've used.

I, too, loathe Android auto complete and autocorrect. I had blamed this on two things:

1. Extraordinarily poor human factors of the virtual keyboard. Keys smaller than a finger tip. No real tactile distinction between keys. No real way to touch type. I'm not saying anything can be done, the small size imposed causes weird, weird typos, typos that will be dramatically different from person to person.

2. Trying to use a larger, or more specialized vocabulary. It's just too hard to determine if something is a typo or an acronym, or some such.

Because whoever bought Swype (which had its own limitations, most particularly that it liked to suggest "née", a word I almost never use, instead of "me", which is one of the most common in English) just buried it. Apple's swiping keyboard is junk, but since I really became used to using Swype on Android for almost a decade, I can't bring myself to use two hands to type on a phone.

"Our", "out", and "put" are going to be tough; so be it. But Swype had the very elegant technique of squiggling on a letter to indicate that it should be doubled, which others do not. And you could capitalize just by swiping up above the keyboard area from the first letter. And it had handy shortcuts by swiping from the Swype key in the bottom left to various places, using it like ctrl on a regular keyboard - A, X, C, V worked as you would expect. And so on. Not to mention that it learned quickly - type "fuck" five times, and it's in the dictionary and won't try to censor you when you Swype it. Not so on iOS.

Guess I'll go back and give SwiftKey and GBoard another chance. Maybe they've improved.

Yea, my experience is with valid, proper grammar getting silently replaced. Like "out" to "put" or "bug" to "bit". I see the correct, intended word show up and then when I hit space it frobs to the wrong one. Other things I see as well, reading comments here (HN in general, not just this thread), where one word is way out of place - but also matches one of my own experiences of over-active-autocorrect.

I've noticed semi-recently that macOS always flags "their" as a mistake, suggesting "there" or "they're" as replacements. I find this extremely annoying as there is seemingly no intelligence to it. I find myself constantly going back and double checking, just to find that I used the right word and it's being needlessly flagged.

For a while my iPhone would autocorrect die -> sue. I've also iced various bugs in both Android and iOS, where backspacing will completely break and start suggesting non words that consist of the word you deleted, concatenated with whatever you started typing afterwards.

I really miss my old LG feature phone from 2009 that had a slide out keyboard. The tactile feedback of a cheap keyboard helped me type so much faster and accurately than any onscreen keyboard ever let me.

Gboard is pretty good with lots of customization options. So much so than when I use the default Android keyboard it feels slow and even broken.

I should have checked this before posting. I'm actually on Gboard, so all of my comments apply to Gboard.

What customizations do you use?

I enable swiping, word suggestions, auto correct, the digits row, the emoji switcher key, shrink the height of the keyboard for easier typing, enable long press symbol insertions, spell-checking etc.

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