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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

My iPhone keyboard is the single most annoying thing about my phone. It hasn’t improved - and potentially is worse - that it was at launch - despite my phone being considerably bigger.

One thing that frustrates me is it doesn’t seem to take into account how precisely I hit a key - if I type really slowly, hitting the centre of each key - that should count for something. It should trust that I put more. But it doesn’t seem to.

It also replaces works with completely random things I’ve never typed ever before. While at the same time missing really obvious corrections, and not taking context into account at all.

The keyboard is probably apple’s current product, after Siri of course.

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It’s also aggravating if you commonly type across two languages. I sometimes forget to change to thé fr_CA keyboard and type a French word with thé en_CA keyboard and vice versa. But now that word is permanently locked in its respective dictionary forever. This is thé reason typing THE takes about 3 tries now. (As you can see…)

The only option is to nuke all thé auto correct dictionaries in settings. Eye-twitchingly aggravating.

You must have very good reasons for keeping AutoCorrect on. I’d really like to “hear” them as I’m feeling that I did not get the point and am missing out by turning it off.

And with it off, I can still manually select valid corrections pretty quickly by tapping suggestions.

Not OP but my reason is handling of diacritics on iOS.

Typing “e” is a baseline but typing “é” feels like it’s 1.5s: hold “e” wait for diacritics to appear, choose one, continue.

Not only this breaks flow but is slow as hell. Word with 4 letters with diacritics takes around 5-6 seconds and it feels slow. Autocorrect fixes most of those quite often.

If language is widely supported (English/Spanish/French) it’s easy and there are other methods of typing (swipe, text prediction) but leave that area and typing on iPhone is painful. Use more than 1 language and it’s even more painful. It almost requires setting the stage to be able to type in selected language and is still janky.

I don’t understand why it is like that. If I’m writing in context of website it should assume that I’m using language of that website and allow me to break out if I really need. There should be API that allows third party apps (chat apps, note apps) to set language by context (like recipient in chat, note in note talking etc.) so that I shouldn’t have need to switch languages at all.

As I’m typing this comment autocorrect is “finding” corrections in 3 languages. I feel like I spent more time removing it than typing.

And yet “languabes” is perfectly good and I had to fix it manually. There is context, I used this word more than once and it’s in the most supported language on the platform.

Come on Apple, this is core user experience. This should be better!

Being multilingual is the bane of the Apple input experience. My day-to-day interactions are in English, but I speak with family members in Russian.

Whenever a Russian text comes through, English Siri will be sure to mangle it, like Mojibake of the mid-90s and early-200s.

There is also no way to ask English Siri to play a song with a non-English title. There actually seems to be a cottage industry of Russian songs on Apple Music with literal translations for this reason.

Russian Siri has a pretty good success rate at picking up English speech but I just don’t want Russian Siri for the rest of the day.

Don’t get me started if you have a multi-language household and want to have HomeKit and Siri.

I think the solution would be to have a UI for picking primary, secondary and tertiary languages for voice interactions. Sadly, I think there won’t be any work done because it’s not perceived as a priority, despite Apple’s messaging at inclusivity and diversity.

Your post is beautiful. It conveys the frustration so well. It would be funny if it wasn't for that.

On Android I'm using the Microsoft SwiftKey keyboard and I feel that they have solved this quite well.

If you use the same layout (for me AZERTY) on the English keyboard and the French one, it will merge them and automatically try to predict the language you're using.

I also type multiple languages, and I make more typing efforts than average, in which case autocorrect really goes nuts. I turned autocorrect off a long time ago. Slower but at least I have control over what I write.

The iPhone autocorrect has got noticeably worse over the last 4 years or so. I’ve been an iPhone user since 2012 and I’m sure it used to be so much easier to type on despite having a significantly smaller screen.

The thing that grinds my gears most is if something happens to be an apple trademark, it will auto capitalise it. For example “power nap” (the name of a feature on macs) becomes “Power Nap”.

I’ve seen a few people saying that the iPhone typing experience has gotten worse lately. I wonder if there’s any analysis to back this up or if Apple are aware?

Well it has. I’d love for an option to go back. I like swipe typing and turning that off seems to be the only way to dial down some of the atrocities the “intelligent” keyboard commits.

https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

And the childish profanity filter. God beware, someone wants to type "shit". We can’t suggest this word and maybe autocorrect it to something else.

I've also had a similar one, typing in French. In my case, it's "c'est chiant" (that's shitty / tough / etc). I usually use it at the beginning of a phrase, so the first C is capitalized.

Now the autocorrect learned that, and offers to fix it if I misspell.

But the funny thing is that it doesn't realize that the capital C is not part of the phrase, even though "c'est", by itself, exists and is often used (meaning "it is"). It typically appears because the auto-capitalize is on, I don't voluntarily type uppercase.

So now, if I want to type that in the middle of a sentence, it will helpfully capitalize the C...

I think they should stop taking input from the keyboard literally, and process it in a similar way to swipe typing which is usually pretty accurate.

Heh, that’s what they did! Sort of.

Turning off “Slide To Type” and “Predictive” returns a normal ios 5 keyboard where you don’t make five typos per word.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33257455

The very first thing I do when I set up a new iPhone is to turn of all auto suggestions, auto spelling, and yes, even the auto capitalization. I’ve become so used to it that I’m almost unable to use other people’s phones…

I recently turned off Slide to Type and enabled the new iOS 16 Haptic feedback for keyboard setting under ‘Sounds and Haptics’. My typing accuracy has improved a lot with these changes.

Why would enabling keyboard haptics improve typing accuracy? I'm just now trying them myself, not having known about the setting before, and it doesn't seem to have any effect other than causing an unpleasant sensation in my fingers as I type.

I've always turned it off on account of desiring battery over sensation feedback.

You are likely extending a battery life by about a minute per day by saving like this.

Interesting. How’d you come to that conclusion?

"Haptic technologies consume minimal power in smartphones" [0]

[0]: https://www.immersion.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/haptic-...

Aha. That would be cool to see an independent reproduction of those experiments. Good stuff.

Wow, thanks for this. I’m loving the haptic feedback. I’m not sure if this is just a placebo effect, but typing feels more precise. Is there anything in “Slide to type” that makes typing less precise?

Yeah the iPhone kb is just plain terrible. And typing accented characters are even worse. Especially because there are several accented characters you don't even use, ever. Wonder why?

The slow animation you can’t disable easily cuts my typing speed in half too. The keyboard experience on Android is so much better it’s almost enough to keep me on that platform alone.

Seriously what the hell are you talking about? Beside you can disable almost all animations if needed through accessibility features.

Yeah you can disable all animations system wide but not selectively just the dumb autocorrect animations.

I had to reactivate autocorrect to understand what you meant. I still struggle to understand your pain. You can easily disable individual assist feature in keyboard settings.

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