Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, missing this 3D Touch.

The input experience (or AI supported typing) is getting worse and worse for me on the iPhone. Especially, if your are using different languages in parallel. For me it is my mother tongue German and my most second language English and sometimes using Spanish. In an (for me) unpredictable way, there are words replaced to "correct" typos. But, independent of the used keyboard language, which is completely ignored for this auto-correct, it replaces it with German word, when I write English and sometimes with English words when I type German. Then this forced touch was helpful to select the letters/word to re-write it correctly to make the sentence meaningful. But now, this whole selection process is completely broken (for me). Since the removal of force touch, when I try to go to a specific spot, it selects parts of the sentence in a completely (for me) unpredictable way. Then I have no chance to un-select anymore, so I have to replace the whole. The experience is getting worse and worse.

I think peak iOS was in the past.

Totally agree with the keyboard and predictive typing being a huge problem child that needs serious attention at this point. Some frustrations I have been dealing with:

- The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.

- The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.

- The infuriating overbearing and downright evil efforts at speech and thought control. For example you can’t swipe type certain things Apple has clearly designated as wrongthink; assuming of course that the only possible reason someone would want to use the sequence of words Apple has designated as wrongthink is for purposes that violate their perspective of narrow utopian authoritarian society.

- That for some reason sooner rather specific acronyms seem to be prioritized over the most common words in the English language through inaccuracy. One example; try swipe typing “is” with some inaccuracy and you get “OSS” instead, ab rather obscure acronym to replace “is”, or OSS it?

- The concatenation of “a” (I think there are others I can’t recall) rather than automatically adding a space when there is a hyper (I think that’s what it’s going on), so e.g., “it’s a” turns into “it’sa” … “he’s a” “what’sa”

- I too have gotten the sense some of it may even have to do with or is exacerbated by using multiple keyboard languages. I love when the autocorrect “AI” substitutes words from a different language altogether, that’sa (that was organic, but left for sarcastic effect) really great feature! (Yes, that’s more sarcasm)

> The random capitalizations for no apparent reason, sometimes even mid word, and no, not from accidentally hitting shift, even during swipe typing.

I've never had capitalization for no apparent reason (maybe I didn't pay enough attention), but I have a similar pet peeve, where the AI learns "a bit too much".

I write a lot of French, and a fairly common phrase I type is "c'est chiant" (that sucks). At first, it would try to autocorrect this to something else, probably because it's "not nice" to write that.

But after insisting on writing that for a while, it must have figured "ok, let him write that". Except that it learned the whole phrase, capitalized, because it's usually the first thing I type, so it automatically capitalizes the first letter (I always rely on automatic capitalization when writing informally).

But now when I want to write that in the middle of a sentence, it will auto-capitalize the C.

Autocorrect has a way of avoiding spicy language and replacing it with something unrelated. Me, I'm tired of this ducking shot.

As I recall, there's a workaround somewhere for that. I too find it irritating that my phone manufacturer would decide they need to censor my language. If I want to use the F word, that's my business. Autocorrect used to just be mildly annoying and humorous. In the last few years it has evolved to infuriating. And it can be so persistent, too. Used to be just back up and retype and it would leave you alone, but much of the time now it just keeps on trying to 'correct' what I'm typing.

Is there a way to change it so autocorrections are shown as suggestions rather than done automatically? I haven't used iOS in a few years, but I recall being frustrated with the default autocorrect implementation.

On other devices/keyboards (SwiftKey for example) I type a word and if it thinks I might mean something else, it shows up in a row of 3 suggestions above the keyboard. If it's correct, I tap the suggestion and it replaces whatever I'd actually typed.

Makes for easy fixes and only adds an extra "tap" if I see a mistake that needs to be corrected. Either way, beats backing up and retyping or jumping through hoops to remove "ducking" from the dictionary.

Another one - you can't use the swipe keyboard to type phrases apple thinks are "naughty", such as "white woman" or "kill myself". iOS will always change one of the two words, e.g. changing "white" to "while" or "kill" to "hill".

It's really fascinating -- on my phone (iOS 15.5), "white people" was correct to "white purple," "black people" was corrected to "blank people" (wtf Apple???), but "Asian people" went through just fine. I wonder if it has to do with something like specific ethnicity vs. broad categorisations used for bigotry. Dunno.

Words starting with a capital are treated as names and not spellchecked by most systems.

> The two word replacement pattern is immensely frustrating and leads to typos, e.g., where “AI” seems to think it knows better what I was trying to write and changes the previous correct word based on what it thinks I am trying to currently type/swipe. A good example just happened below; I tried typing “mid word” below, once I started swipe typing “word” iOS thought it would be a great idea to change “mid” to make it “miss words”. Thanks for the unhelp Apple.

SwiftKey on Android (Microsoft) does the same thing to me on occasion. It is indeed very annoying.

I’ve been experiencing something similar recently, and for a while even thought it was just me getting worse at typing on such a small keyboard.

However, the points you make are absolutely right, and in addition it has recently developed the annoying trait of sometimes choosing to replace previous words that I have specifically typed and selected.

I disable autocorrect now. The occasional typos are more clear compared to replacing a word entirely for a wrong one.

I don't disagree with you.

But I think it's great that the keyboard language does not define the autocorrect language.

The German keyboard has smaller-sized keys and it would drive me insane I think if I had to switch to the German keyboard in order to type German text.

You can change the keyboard layout per language. I type mostly in French (on an otherwise English language phone) and use French in QWERTY layout.

For the special characters (é, à, etc), I long-press and choose whatever I need.

Since I hate typing on the phone, I quite like using the suggestions, especially for words with multiple special characters.

I disagree. In my experience you just develop different muscle memories for different languages after enough time. The Zhuyin keyboard for Chinese has four rows and even smaller keys but basically works fine once you have some practice with it.

For your autocorrect issue with other languages: in addition to having the keyboards activated, do you also have the languages activated in Settings / General / Language & Region? I had to have both the keyboard enabled and the language in here to stop the default-language only autocorrects.

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