Anecdotally, I've heard autocorrect is much better on iOS 17. But I won't update until the general release next week.
That’s how autocorrect has worked since day one, it was just using a simpler heuristic-based prediction rather than a machine learning model.
The solution badly needed isn't a complicated black box model when we know a simple one is good enough.
In the last couple of weeks using the beta I’ve found myself fighting it more than ever. After years of typing by tapping at the screen, I’ve switched to swiping the words in because it seems to be more reliable.
That was when they first changed to a machine learning-based model. I’m hoping this one is better.
Same with proper nouns. If I deliberately start a word with a capital letter it’s probably a proper noun and I know how it’s spelled, don’t correct me.
Fix this shit, Apple, it’s the one part of iPhone I really hate.
And I’d like to add that the editing experience is also dire and getting worse.
Just trying to put the cursor where I want it to fix an error earlier in the sentence in ios17 is a massive pain in the ass.
You tap somewhere and it continually selects entire words - I just want to put the cursor there dammit!
Also, getting the copy/paste menu to show takes a very long time
I can never press on underlined words that are the last word before a linebreak while typing.
It’s been broken for years. YEARS!
I recently realised how much of a difference it makes when you type quickly as I got an extra work phone with stock android I have to use occasionally.
There is also a feature of this app I use only occasionally, but when I do its great. It let's you type by moving your finger between letters in one continously motion. When one describes it seems rather weird, but it's really one of the best features of the app. You can write really fast this way, the only difficulty it has is with very uncommon words.
FYI, this has been included in stock iOS keyboard for a while now.
So far I prefer iOS because the predictive text above the keyboard (in iOS 16 too) and in particular the speech to text feature has been so good!
The only egregious error that I have encountered has been confusion around the phrase “into” when I mean “in two”. An understandable mistake.
I don't think you could do any better unless you were from Cupertino. With an Irish accent, my experience has been... okay with Apples text to speech, it's certainly better than others, but I still have to make a conscious effort to enunciate quite differently to my normal speech.
OpenAI's whisper has really impressed me though, and transcribes almost everything perfectly, even if I throw in phrases or words from other languages part way through the conversation.
No one credible, least of all a guy like me who had been an enthusiastic amateur for a few years, is saying the stuff hadn’t gotten pretty wild recently.
But unprecedented? Nah.
Is this what progress looks like?
Source: I have one :p