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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

It’s incredibly rare that I can type even a single sentence correctly on the iPhone. In that one it came out ‘in’ and not ‘on’ for example. In that one I typed sample not example. I got that last one right! I see the arguments from both sides but it’s a real shame the design space of smartphones has become so conservative. Such intensely personal devices deserve to be more varied. If I thought I could build some sort of cyberdeck with a 5G radio and reliable Bluetooth for a headset I think I might get a kick out of that. And then I’d probably go back to the iPhone because it works better and has better battery life. “Probanly”.

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This was true for me until the latest iOS release. The new autocorrect is markedly better. It used to be that at least 30% of words (not even sentences!) were misspelled. Now it's pretty rare. I think the auto-correct on the iPhone is even better than how I type on a laptop keyboard. Pretty crazy!

This was true for me until the latest iOS release, but then it got worse for me. The inline predictions were especially problematic, but they added a toggle in the settings for it.

I think this puts me in the market for a keyboard like this

Sometimes I feel hacker news audience either have a very unique use case with their software/hardware or they are living in an alternative universe. The latest iOS keyboard is absolutely better than anything I've tried. I am sometimes shocked that it could autocorrect what I initially typed because it was so far off! And I have big fingers!

I feel the same re: Hacker News audiences. I believe I'm very far off Apple's QA "golden path". That said, I've only used the SE and Mini iPhones, and things might be better on the phablet-style iPhones.

I'd say the iOS 17 beta keyboard was the second worst mobile keyboard I've experienced since the 9-key dialpad keyboards, but there is another person in this thread for whom that was their favorite keyboard :) There is at least a lot of variety here.

I'm also waiting on ChatGPT-like experience, their (Whisper) text-to-speech is amazing, including my native Ukrainian.

The worst part about iOS autocorrect is that it will change previous words and it drives me wild. So even though I had typed a word correctly, I am 2-3 words ahead and it decides to just change the previous word making the sentence nonsense.

Also the constant autocorrection of swearing is really annoying.

You can fix the swearing part if you google it

Having to manually white list every word you want to be able to type isn't a great solution. Androids autocorrect automatically adds words to the dictionary as you type and hit allow.

Agreed but figured I'd mention it

You may know this and not like it, or find it doesn’t work for you, but on the off chance you don’t: just keep going. Autocorrect will often step in and correct things one or two words later when it works out that letters near where you tapped make a more plausible sentence than the ones you actually tapped.

Yeah, I mean with autocorrect. Without that I don't think I could type a single word tbh. The AI they rolled out in the last year or so has been noticeably better too, but still my thumbs are clearly not in the normal human range.

I think iOS changed its behavior like this in the past year or two and it's so frustrating after years of per-word autocorrect. Like having the text flow around randomly while typing out your sentence, seeing the text be _entirely wrong_, and just having to pray that the text will end up right at the end of the action.

I don't know what is better here but honestly per-word predictions were way better for my usecases.

Yeah, you're the only one. It's easy to type on iphones bud

Shame there's not always something worth typing though.

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