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Comment by voytec | Hacker News Reader

> The error rate at speech recognition seems to have gone up over the years.

Input recognition quality falling all over the place - it's very much noticeable with their onscreen keyboards as well. Some "intelligent" mechanisms know better which button I tried to tap and I'm getting gibberish even with auto-correct off. It's the same on iPhone and Watch.

Apple has already forced me to re-learn keyboards once - with the MacBook Pro 2017 fiasco when I had to start carrying external keyboard with my "mobile" laptop. Haven't bought a MacBook since.

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Their swype-style keyboard is an absolute joke—perhaps the most infuriating part of my iphone. I know that it’s easier to criticize than it is to implement, but my god, just a basic markov chain would yield more intelligible results than the shit it comes up with.

It's honestly a complete travesty. Strongly considering ditching my iPhone for the upcoming Pixel Fold or whatever it'll be called.

Can't you just change the keyboard on your iPhone?

You can, but it's not really endorsed by Apple. As such, some folks don't even know about that. Personally, I like to use SwiftKey.

//Edit: Would really like to know for what I got down voted for?

I haven’t downvoted, but might be because third-party keyboards have been officially supported for many year in iOS. Your comment gives the impression they’re some kind of hack.

Thank you! No, that wasn't how I intend to mean it. If I recall correctly, the implementation was very restricted when the feature first launched in 2016. And if I recall correctly, it's not a feature which Apple would mention ever again.

Therefore, I have the impression that this is not a feature Apple would endorse much.

It's completely supported, you can get keyboard replacements on the app store.

It's just less secure to use them than the one built into the OS because the third party keyboards might run input through some web service instead of keeping it completely local.

There is a default-off toggle for whether to allow a keyboard to use the network, but of course it's so much more useful enabled that I expect everyone enables it.

Personally i would higher consider the galaxy fold over the pixel fold. i remember when samsung released their first foldable phone it was a very expensive trainwreck and they are now at a point where i here they are decent

i would not for the life of me trust google with a 1st attempt at any hardware implementation. especially with one that will be pretty expensive

Samsung phones sadly intentionally gimp themselves and can't run GrapheneOS

Totally agree so I installed SwiftKey. It worked great for years and I’ve been super happy! Then in the last year, SwiftKey has been randomly crashing so while I type I swap between the SwiftKey and normal keyboard unwillingly several times per message. The built-in keyboard seems absolutely determined to believe that the word 'fuck' does not exist.

You can easily add fuck into your dictionary: Settings>General>Keyboard >Text Replacement.

This is useful advice but, the frustration is warranted if a user needs to modify a sub-sub-sub menu to undo a default that is not even grammatically correct.

for crashing reinstall of swiftkey helped me. seems stable ever since

For some very odd reason, swipe keyboard technology seems to have peaked around 2014, never to reach those heights again.

I remember being amazed by how great swiping was, and after using it recently (it's not really great on gboard or samsung keyboard either, not bad but just meh) I was wondering if it was just rose tinted glass. But nope, I booted up my old nexus 5 with a normal gboard (not even swiftkey!) and it was still amazing. The contrast was amazing even when I wiped typing data on both phones to make sure that it was a fair comparison.

I guess the most glaring difference was the subtle, but extremely important handling of edge cases or particularly ambigious letter combinations. Even the "bad" modern google keyboard is still 95% accurate, but the difference between that and the 99% accuracy on my nexus 5 basically makes all the difference. It goes from predictive magic to having to swipe across every single letter to make sure it works.

Very much agree!!

I remember not even knowing the spelling of words but being able to swipe in the general direction of letters I thought might be correct and it inputting the correct word.

Now now it seems I have to have near perfect tracing and pathing to get correct words.

It's very disappointing.

Could it be related to screen size and finger mechanics?

That honestly could be it! My past few galaxy phones have been narrower and taller than my old note4 (the nexus was more compact but with an aspect ratio that was more "square" ). The narrow and tall screens makes hitting keys a lot harder, now that I think about it.

I switched to an iphone mini and experienced a minor improvement in my typing accuracy, but it’s still pretty torturous compared to back in the day.

I read somewhere that that’s about when they switched from hand coded lists to machine learning for autocorrect.

I find swiping better than screen touch-typing, but still not as good as old QWERTY.

What are your talking about? You done like it converting “your” to “your” on every damn time you type the word?

Note: the above paragraph was typed with swipe typing. I actually typed “Y O U” for both of the above instances of “your.”

Apple swipe typing is the opposite of AI: it’s like an idiot is going behind you taking even correct words you swipe and turning them into gibberish. Don’t even get me started about its obsession with “it’s” and “we’re” to the exclusion of the words without apostrophes. Ughhhhhh

I never write on an iphone, so didn't know today's ridiculous apostrophizing is an autocorrect thing - but that could explain why people sound like idiots or would that be sound like idiot's on the internet.

The keyboards on the Apple M Macbooks are good, having used one myself... Except there's this feeling that Macbook keyboards fundamentally "work" differently to all other keyboards out there.

I'm primarily a Windows wizard, I use my Macbook for specific tasks and it's not my daily driver. I can type on my Macbook mostly fine, but occasionally it misses some of my key inputs. I know the keyboard works, the key in question types in properly when I press it again, but nonetheless I have the occasional input go missing as I type.

I don't know why this is the case, it annoys me, and I'm left wondering if it's the keyboard with no obvious defects or my typing which works flawlessly with literally all other keyboards I ever come across.

Sounds like user error, I don't have any such problems with my M2 keyboard.

That’s interesting because I use the same keyboard with my Mac and Windows work laptop hooked up to a dock, and Windows + Teams (where I’m doing the majority of my actual typing words not code in a day) constantly has weird artifacts of switching lettering, like it’s kicking off some async process to grab keystrokes right as I open a message then flushes the buffer out of order to the application. It’s really weird and I thought it was user error at first but I’ve noticed this never happens on my Mac.

Then again Teams specifically is just kind of the worst. At least they finally added the full range of emoji reacts to messages. (Still doesn’t beat Slacks custom emojis but oh well).

I have the same issue with slack and any facebook app frequently -- especially if you type, delete, type quickly. I think there must be some damn crdt within the draft edits feature that causes the final state not to match exactly what would be expected from the input sequence.

It's very annoying because it feels like I'm being gaslit by the device -- the errant results can pop in after some delay .... "was I misreading what I saw had been typed earlier on screen??"

I have this issue using some keyboards. I think it has to do with key spacing and pressure required. You could be missing the key by hitting the edge of it.

The butterfly keyboard from previous Apple laptop generations is absolute trash. Every time it takes me a few minutes to get used to it.

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