Microsoft deleted the public support forums for SwiftKey
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To be honest and as a heavy user of SwiftKey on iOS, they updated the app and released a fix before all the AI hype in the last couple of months. They might have this in mind as part of their vision from that point, but it is not to say that
Is SwiftKey back? Can I start using it again? Will they just yank it again in three months when people get bored of the AI gimmick?
I'm confused.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/microsoft-will-end-s...
Can we please, as an industry, stop selling good things to big companies just so they can smother them with a pillow?
Gboard is much better in that, but it has a lot of minor bugs that annoy me constantly and they refuse to fix them. Gboard will randomly show up with weird scaling issues until you hide and reopen keyboard, sometimes it will just randomly crash and restart while typing, often has layouting issues when switching orientation. Google clearly just doesn't care enough to support it.
SwiftKey fixed most of those annoyances for me. I dropped it when they said they won't support it anymore but I'm actually happy they reversed that decision and I just installed it again.
(I'm using edge with bing button and SwiftKey with Bing button.)
The Bing->Chat buttons just open the Bing app currently. I'm curious if they will directly integrate it.
> I actually was thinking along the lines of "interesting coincidence" but now I actually believe it is not a coincidence and they really did do this just to prevent people discussing welding Bing and "AI" into the FUCKING KEYBOARD
Thus iOS support is just at:
https://support.swiftkey.com/hc/en-us/categories/200371942-i...
As a further note, Microsoft support is centralised at support.microsoft.com and it appears that they are currently adding all these help topics there too:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/swiftkey
IMO this falls into "don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
As an aside, I suspect these bing-related features are the only reason the product was brought back from the dead. Looks like Microsoft are adding features to allow you to help author text supported by GPT (e.g. change the tone of the message, rewrite portions from the keyboard etc)
SwiftKey, Edge, and several other Microsoft properties are actually under the auspices of Bing Ads now. A while ago, Microsoft made the wild move to shuffle a bunch of branches under the leadership of former Yandex CTO Mikhail Parakhin. Gradually, Mikhail began to make moves that caused a fair number of the original Edge team -- those who had come from IE, brought up Spartan, then brought up Edge-on-Chromium -- to leave in fits of rage over the anticonsumer path the browser team was being forced down. The engineers revolted and left when they couldn't fight anymore.
LinkedIn tells a lot about people moving from Edge to other places and even other companies afterwards. Some of the longest time zealots of the platform have turned their back on the tools they helped make because of it.
Fast forward about a year and we get The Fucking Bing Button. A top Bing search query for several weeks was "Remove the fucking bing button in edge" (or some variant thereof). Top results are all how to get rid of the Bing discover button: https://imgur.com/qZQ1NLn
I would not be surprised if there was backlash against it in the forums that Mikhail did not like. SwiftKey is a much smaller product space that does not have a high revenue, which means that he has every incentive to make it bleed every penny it can.
eg. with Edge it's blatantly clear it's not made asking "how can it be the best tool for the user" but "how can we best use the user to drive Bing+GPT"
Thank fuck for Brave.
My guess is that there's some legal issue involved. Maybe the lawyers were convinced that somebody posting illegal or confidential info on an unmoderated forum is a big risk, and deleting the entire things is cheaper than paying some moderators.
They are just cutting costs. Forums need moderators (I am one of them, lol), and businesses can't rely on volunteers for that. Expect them to open new forums whenever they need to push adoption of some new product, re-hiring mods as part of the budget for that push.
I Have No Keyboard and I Must Scream ?
Swiftkey just lets me auto-complete/swipe in multiple languages seamlessly. Want to swipe 1 English word inside a completely Dutch sentence? No problem. The reverse? No problem. Using Google's keyboard the same way is endlessly frustrating.
But if you need to loanword a non-common word from English into another language (e.g. Hebrew), Gboard just can't do it. If you change character sets, you change entire dictionaries. SwiftKey has a unified dictionary among all languages and makes a best guess approximation based on the current language selected and then tries the other languages you have configured.
This means that if you're going along in, say, French, but then need to reference a word in Hebrew, you can swipe over to Hebrew, bang out a word, then swap back to French, type words in English (which get autocorrected in english) and then continue in French. This isn't really feasible in Gboard without a lot of back and forth.
Written on a SwiftKey keyboard used to write English, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic with minimal issues.
Though to be fair, I think the stock keyboard is probably almost as good these days and that the difference is that my SwiftKey keyboard has been trained on my writing for several years. Though I have no idea more than that I quickly get annoyed when I try to type on the stock one.
This is very obvious when I need to type on someone else's device or when I try other keyboards. They do similar things, each in their own way, but just don't do it quite so well as SwiftKey does it.
Since Microsoft bought the app I've stopped logging into it with an account (so reinstalls and new phones mean I need to retrain the keyboard) and have taken away the internet permission so it can't do any creepy stuff like send telemetry. Somehow Bing found itself into the keyboard, probably an automatic update I forgot to turn off in the Play store.
The addition of Bing is just one more sad step in the development of the app I probably use most on my phone. I switched to SwiftKey exactly because I didn't trust Google's Gboard and now all this Cortana 2.0 crap is making the keyboard just as bad as the one I dropped years ago.
Fast edit: it's Monday morning, I didn't realise there were so many other replies already.
EDIT: It's good, but not as good as Swiftkey in its UX. Swiping for punctuation doesn't work, you need to long press and swipe. Pressing space to insert the prediction and then pressing comma doesn't remove the space, so it requires an awkward dance to insert a comma and a prediction simultaneously. There's no gesture to dismiss the keyboard, the "delete word" swipe is a bit awkward, long pressing buttons doesn't give you punctuation, and that's just what I've found in a few minutes of use. I hope they address these soon.
I also don't to use my phone much anymore (since I reduced social media usage and disabled notifications).
FWIW I think the reason I moved away from SwiftKey was because it kept having strange language issues in a multilingual setup, but I haven't used it in a while; probably 5+ years.
Maybe I'm just not a touchscreen keyboard power user any longer
It consistently gives me "sine" over "some" and never learns. I type "sine" maybe a couple of times a day and type "some" dozens of times a day. I imagine getting the weighting right is tricky but it just seems to be wrong most of the time.
I don't remember SwiftKey being any better but I might give it another try just in case.
Superficially yes[1]. But they are so much better, especially the multi-language support, that nothing else really compares. I've been using Swiftkey since before the Microsoft purchase, and really dislike having to use the default keyboards on both Android and iOS.
[1] It also has a lot more configurable keyboard layouts and theming, but I don't really use those.
But the better predictive text is kind of huge. Makes typing much faster and easier when the predictions are more commonly correct. As an aside, I expect this could get massively better over the near future given this new investment in LLMs.
I've been using it on Android for many years now. The stock keyboards are, perhaps ironically, like the stock browser in Windows was until very recently: the one you use to get the good one. (Edge is still that, but now it's also the place to use Bing Chat...)
https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype-ke...
Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Vietnamese.
This is the sort of thing I think someone would have found a better solution for if more languages (and possibly English in particular) had non-spaced compound nouns.
(to be clear I'm petty enough to be willing to give it all up for not having to stare at a fucking Bing button, so I uninstalled it)
It also lets me write multiple languages, with working autocomplete in each, without changing keyboard.
Finally, for many of us who needs non-English input, the obvious other choice of iOS keyboard doesn't offer any predictions at all. I guess setting up embarrassing word swaps for Norwegian isn't a priority.
That is definitely the killer feature for me. So I have an old version of swiftkey, blocked Internet access because fuck me if I let Microsoft snoop on all I write, and an xposed module (Exi) with useful mods.
PS: if anyone has a Free Software alternative I'm all ears.
Mixed language model learning: ngram models learnt on phone span base language models so it's very good at Spanglish.
A probabilistic typing model is learnt on device to capture characteristic patterns of key presses/misses for your typing style.
And, it does the slidy input if I want that.
For me this is half of it, it's also performance. It is MUCH faster at bringing up word suggestions. As in faster than I can even reach my thumb up to type the next word there are already excellent suggestions available, and I often can type entire sentences only touching keys on the keyboard a few times.
Just the performance difference makes the iOS builtin keyboard predictions almost unusable for me (in addition to the fact that the predictions are simply much better on swiftkey).
If I were tapping keys with two hands, which I sometimes end up doing (single handed)... no idea which keyboard would be better.
Gboard is worth a try, it feels more responsive to me. Its predictions aren't always good though, at least in languages other than English.
With the bezel-less smartphones, I found that if the keyboard sits at the bottom of the screen, one-handed typing is impossible for my thumb. With swiftkey I can basically add a bezel at the bottom to bring the keyboard up to where I can comfortably type with one hand.
But, in any case, I do like how it can predict a word as you type, so you don't have to type the full word out before releasing your finger and it will toe out the rest, and it does a good job of predicting phrases I types a lot, so for those I don't even have to type them out fully... I just have to type the first word or so and then tap on the predicted words to fill in the rest (or however many words of the prediction I want)... it can be a time saver.
This along with swipe are life-savers.
People need to take a break. Being terminally online and complaining about everything is not a healthy way of life.
I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
Our internal understanding of our own bodies seems to adapt to take the tools we're using into account.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_schema
https://scholar.google.co.nz/scholar?q=related:5uSissKo6EgJ:...
In a broader sense, it never fails to amaze me that a kilo and a half of goopy cells that evolved to work out where the plants that won't kill you and where to trap rabbits in the next valley are - things that are, generally speaking, not much further than you can see - can visualise every step and turn of a journey of hundreds of miles, while being shoved through space at roughly 20 times normal walking speed, and do this for many different journeys *including ones we have not taken yet* but which happen to be in roughly the same direction as where we were a last week.
Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
How do we do this with a brain that evolved to cope with a couple of miles of hills and forest? Is it because I can drive a car at 60mph and therefore cover twenty times the distance I can walk in roughly the same time, so it all just scales naturally?
It's crazy, isn't it?
You'll be thinking about this next time you drive.
That is nothing. Try to run through a forest chasing a deer. Your brain will be calculating paths around trees, planning each footfall based on 3d terrain scans in your peripheral vision, constantly recalculating the position and likely path of the deer, and all the while a subroutine is calculating the trajectory of the rock you are about to through at your (hopefully) future dinner. That is what the human brain evolved to do. In comparison, driving a car along a road is like watching paint dry.
Then think about what the deer brain is doing. It does all the same terrain mapping and 3d planning, but does so at double or triple the bandwidth. Deer see 300+ degrees, humans only 130ish.
There is nothing in the history of mankind that would need for this to be a possible skill; no conceivable evolutionary pressure lead to being able to transfer the feeling for the size of our body onto other objects, while being inside those objects. We can just do that!
What’s happening here is that your eyes are connected to a very highly trained model of the physical world around you. And your subjective experience of vision occurs post-processing through that model. It’s the same model you use to physically navigate the world, so it has a similar subjective feel regardless of what you’re doing.
It’s not limited to cars and tools; pitchers can “feel” the strike zone, even though it’s 60 feet away. Like driving, this takes a lot of reps to develop (lots of training data).
I haven't heard this claim before - any specific reading I should look for?
While you're running through the woods, you have to see and account for every rock and root or you trip, fall, and get literally eaten alive. While driving on a road, you don't need to consider the road itself at all, really.
That's the technology of roads - removing all obstacles to travel. A road is literally an empty, smooth space. So now you only need to consider traffic, turns, and distance.
I'm not surprised at all that our brains that can probably remember the locations of every fruiting bush and tree in our territory can efficiently encode some turns.
That’s where your misunderstanding is. A lot of animals are migratory, including us. We _did_ evolve to understand how to cross continents.
Mentioning that as the way we adapt with different units, feeling natural about them, and getting defensive about them, too.
4 hour drive and you're about half way to your parent's place, and they're in the same province.
I would however point out that I am not British, I'm Scottish.
Of course, they might _technically_ be British from a legal standpoint, which I'm sure Gordonjcp is aware of. It's entirely possible to be both British and not-British simultaneously in different contexts. This sort of thing isn't black and white.
Absolutely, but it would be nice if people expressed their wishes in logical terms. "I prefer to describe that dog as a terrier" is logically sound, "that is a terrier, not a dog" is not. The latter tries to arbitrarily redefine what a dog is.
It's a bit like "Charlie's not a dog, he's my best friend"
I'd argue that one can be damaging and we should call people out on it.
Dogs are dogs and they need to be treated like dogs. The infantilization of dogs is how you get unleashed dogs getting into dog fights when it turns out that Charlie really just is another dog and should have been leashed.
Shorthands are fine, but this is not it. This is some weird agenda to deny the logical truth.
Yay for Brexit.
If they did, depending upon what that encompasses, then either large swathes of Scotland would be included (Glasgow is a Brythonic name!), or you'd be excluding England from the discussion.
Largely without fail, someone talking about Britain is talking of the island itself, or the current inhabitants.
It's also pretty amazing on a social level too. With a few obvious exceptions (certain signage, driving on the left or right side, etc.) the whole system was standardized for every adult in the entire world in something like 50 years. Everyone wanting to "get into" driving has to play by some basic rules. (And not following them is far more likely to be a mistake than intentional, at scale.)
Then I look at bees and I realize we're really not that special.
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/honeybee-mental-number-l... https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230307144358.h... https://today.ucsd.edu/story/complex-learned-social-behavior...
This seems to break down when we deal with things without easily appreciated analogues e.g. black holes and quantum physics.
OTOH I don't know why we can pick up driving and cycling so easily. Some people instinctively know how to countersteer an oversteering car.
Predators are way faster than our walking speed. And the faster road is the more gentle any turn is so going 120km/h on a highway doesn't really require that much more reflex than running on twisty forest path.
> Where I'm sitting it is a four hour drive to even get to England and yet I can clearly visualise where I'd go if I was driving around Bradford, another couple of hours further south. For that matter, it's not much more effort to visualise driving right to the south coast of England, working out where to get the ferry at Dover, and then how to drive right to Geneva from Dunkirk, and drive around there too.
That has nothing to do with cars, people travelled before them.
You might say "but it is bigger area" but it is also scaled up to car size. And with clear landmarks, hell, even signs telling you where you are and where to go.
That's significantly easier than going into dense forest, that also changes look based on seasons.
Straight on at full speed and hope you manage to dodge the local nutters driving like maniacs en route.
(I did actually like Bradford in a bunch of ways but the drivers were still impressively aggressive, to the point where being a pedestrian in Italy was honestly quite a comfortable experience)
Fucking *Wakefield*, though.
We're a species that has navigated its way across the world.
Human tribes frequently migrated seasonally with the herds on which we depended for food and clothing.
We're very well equipped for long distance travel.
However it's a large book and I'll have to give it a reread since this is based on a vague recollection. But it's been in my mind more and more lately, especially with all the AI hype in the news.
> I'd even say, perhaps it's best not to tell people that their problems aren't problems to begin with. I'm not saying one should care, it'd be enough just not to explicitly dismiss on their face.
generally speaking, the opposite is true - people need to take some accountability for their problems, thanks to the disintegration of conversation people have had it too easy to simply mute or block opinions they found uncomfortable, helping them to avoid facing problems much more than it's sane to do
No way to type Chinese with an open source keyboard. And no way to do local speak-to-text (even English) with an open source keyboard
phones aren't great for input, and perhaps won't be in the foreseeable future, but using proprietary closed keyboards with no roughly-equivalent alternatives just compounds the problem
every time I want to type something substantial, in any language, I wait until I have access to a computer; it's particularly bad in Japanese and Chinese in my experience, but it's not great in any language - in Asian languages you'd get good over time with some specific system (say 4-corners, zhuyin, kana/conv, and specific predictive dictionaries) and then have support end, so why even bother?
I'm not a native speaker but Microsoft's pinyin on windows and Google's pinyin input system on Linux both give much better results than the few open source alternatives I've tried .. so the situation is only marginally better at the desktop (I haven't tried text to speak on the desktop)
It's one of those weird areas where theyre both supposedly old solved problems - but for some reason nobody has bothered to make open source solutions
it works well enough for me on my computer, and i simply avoid phones for input - anything "phone" is factory-lobotomised and nothing else should really be expected, and even if the software were to suddenly be best effort, you'd still have to overcome very taxing interface limitations
this has the disadvantage of making you even less at home in other devices but hey, my reality is what when this happens I wouldn't have been any better off regardless
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/28/musk-tw...
That's on top of Twitter previously finding that right Wong voices were already amplified far more than those on the left, which was during the peak of the right wing complaints of being silenced
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
If it goes away or embeds features you don’t like, nobody is kicking your crutches away.
"In September 2022, Microsoft announced it was terminating support for the iOS version of SwiftKey. The app was removed from the App Store on October 5.[15]
In November 2022, Microsoft announced a reversal of its decision to discontinue SwiftKey for iOS devices. The app was relisted on November 18, with Microsoft promising future updates for the app. The company cited "customer feedback" as a reason for SwiftKey's return.[16]"
Assuming "customer feedback" is a euphemism for people complaining online then perhaps this is sometimes an effective strategy. These so-called "tech" companies often have no meaningfui Customer Service as they do not want to pay for it, but it seems they do pay people to monitor what is said about them online.
The keyboard works in such a way that it learns your typing style and then understands what you type without the requirement for actually hitting the right keys.
I can type "ky nt gromf koe stw uoi" and it will become "hi my friend how are you".
This makes typing on a phone extremely fast.
The problem is that other keyboards that claim to have similar features are not able to understand my typing gibberish.
In essence, I and many other Swiftkey users have trained ourselves to no longer be able to use any other keyboard.
Is this worth being mad over? In my opinion yes, a product loved by many being purchased by a big company who then close down support avenues is always a good reason to be mad.
I will be impressed, though, if you can find (or make) Dvorak keycaps for my keyboard that match its current style.
Such people can be pretty miserable, sometimes all the time, thus prone to venting.
They would stop if you could fix their broken body and broken lives.
While you use qualifiers like "some" and "can" throughout, I don't really see any substance to the comment.
Basically, a single person existing that does match your comment makes your comment true, without any hint at how pervasive this might be.
There used to be -- and may still be -- hash tags and such on Twitter to help such people find each other.
I'm very seriously handicapped and don't get out much. It's why I spend so much time online.
It's called testimony -- giving a voice for a topic I have a lot of firsthand knowledge of. I have no idea why you are attacking it so aggressively.
As such, I thank you for sharing your story: that requires courage for sure, and can certainly give support for any one point! If that use of qualifiers is what gives you that courage, take my apology for being so "aggressive".
I was simply suggesting to avoid generalizing, even (especially) when starting from your own experience. Your comment suggested that all the handicapped people might have the same reasons and same feelings, which I felt inappropriate.
Note to self:
Next life, be a rich white male or some shit.
In retrospect, you didn't do anything wrong, and I read too much into it: my bad, so sorry!
While they had a strong reaction to this that was over the top at points, I still feel it was a worthwhile thread documenting a new problem.
What you are doing is an overly simplistic deflection
There you go. But we need to go a step further.
They need to get off altogether rather than being terminally online or addicted to social media. In regards to this, it is very sad to see of all things, many on that site are throwing a tantrum....
...over a keyboard.
"Welcome to the Microsoft Support Community! Thank you for your excellent question. As a Microsoft MVP (Mostly Vacuous Pinhead) I am more than happy to help with your problem. I am sure this will help:
<useless copy-pasted non-solution>
1. Set fire to your PC
2. Give up on life
On another note, I have just installed two alternative keyboards today to play around with. OpenBoard and AnySoftKeyboard both with some nice features.
sounds very healthy.
It's a way to shut down debate while pretending to use a legitimate debating technique. A tale as old as the internet itself.
I'm still adapting weeks after changing, the most annoying issue is that the Japanese keyboard on Gboard has the key layout a bit different that the English one, so I cannot touch type on it like I did before.
Guess I'm on the search for a new keyboard as well then. le sigh...
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if current keyboards implemented some kind of a GPT-light network. It is just the perfect tool for the job.
It's gross how every Microsoft product eventually starts to try to upsell Edge or Bing.
[0] E.g., suggesting that the user needs to completely reinstall Windows to fix an issue that could be dealt with by a simple registry hack, or similar.
They want you to use Gboard instead, but the functionality is worse. I don't get it.
Google Pinyin Input made it very easy to enter punctuation, by doing a minor downward swipe on the virtual key associated with the symbol you want. (You can also swipe up on keys to quickly produce capital letters.) On Gboard, as far as I can tell, you have to do a long press instead, which is a gigantic pain.
I resorted to pulling the apk off my old phone and manually installing it on my new phone, but this feels ridiculous.
Can anyone recommend (a) a pinyin input method that doesn't force you to long press for punctuation, or (b) a setting I've overlooked in any major input method that removes the insane long press requirement?
I do hope someone will create a good keyboard with a sustainable business model: charge a fair subscription price.
(be mindful this site is not the official repo and a keyboard is a critical app).
Anyway moving on...
I was the PM for a keyboard app with millions of downloads and was the most downloaded keyboard app in India. But there is no way to monetize it.
Early on, the OEMs would pay us to have our keyboards in their images as it would give them more customizability, better local language support and end-to-end localization. The rev share on each device sold, was enough to keep the product funded.
But post 2014, the OEMs started asking for fees to add our keyboard into their images. And instead of positive funds, we started to go into negative and had to pivot away from being just a keyboard.
Anyway, right now there is not much market opportunity in this space. Maybe with AI being ubiquitous, a new wave of keyboard apps will come in - but again right now the economics don't make sense.
I wish we were in a world where several good keyboards on mobile, like shells/terminals on desktop, existed just for the sake of making the world a better place and none of them needed integrating with Ads/Search Engines/AI etc. for the sake of generating revenue.
Even better, I wish we lived in a world where the programmers of such tools were well paid for their services, whether through philanthropy or government grants or something else.
I don’t understand this. Where you giving it away?
We also had a pro version, but as our app was focused on the Indian market, and the Indian users were not big on paid apps back in early 2010s, there's wasn't much revenue in that either.
I tried a few of the available options and it seems like gboard and SwiftKey on top, then a huge chasm, then every other option, few of them likely low quality data stealers.
Please, do it well and take my money!