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When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, t

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. What I remember is that it sounded like pretty simple lookups. As you typed, the software compared your word to, essentially, a weighted dictionary to guess what you were going to type next. If you typed “b” it was flummoxed. But if you typed “behav” it knew the next letter was almost certainly going to be “e” or “i” (for behavior). It may have been more complicated than that, but probably not much. It was 2007 and the phone CPU was not powerful. One interesting thing I remember is that they said the phone enlarged the touch targets for highly predicted next letters. For example it would be easier to type an “e” than a “w” after you had typed “behav”, because the tap boundary expanded around the “e”. Cool stuff! And if you did type behavw and hit space, it would autocorrect to behave. At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. Rather than a simple deterministic look-up, it was trained on a huge corpus of text, and reads the whole chunk of what you’ve written so far to make predictions. Everyone does this now, it’s how they deliver the (incredibly annoying and stupid IMO) one-tap suggestions for email and text replies. “Thanks!” “Noted.” “I’ll get right on that.” In my memory, that’s when typing got a lot more annoying on iPhones. The quality of suggestions went either down or weirdo or both. For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why??

mathieuh 4y ago
Do people actually send messages to each other like that? I modified all the precomposed replies on my watch to remove capitals and punctuation. Using capitals and punctuation raises the register of the message for me, and 99% of the time if I’m sending a text it’s to friends or family.
- odysseus 4y ago
  What does "raises the register" in this context mean?
  - dopidopHN 4y ago
    Register of speak I suppose ? Formal, vulgar, technical, casual... I might be wrong English is not my first language. But that would fits nicely. I understand that as going from casual to formal, for instance.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      “Raise the bar” would be the colloquially used term around here.
  - rattus_rattus 4y ago
    It means the formality level of text. I think that person was saying that within their family chats, they perceive that using capitals and punctuation makes the messages feel unnecessarily/inappropriately formal.
    - mathieuh 4y ago
      Yes exactly.
- Lio 4y ago
  I normally wouldn’t say anything but since it’s the topic of conversation, I hate that. I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression. Depends on your circle of friends I guess.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    I think it's not unreasonable to expect there to be written dialects as well as spoken ones. A comparatively huge amount of a person's communication is written these days, where previously it would have been face-to-face or with a phone call. The general spoken register where I live skews informal, so I assume this has carried over to written communication. Using capitals and punctuation comes across to me as stilted and like an email or a letter rather than a text message. It's an interesting subject definitely
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    > I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression. interesting, why does it seem as passive aggression? for me upper/lowercase just feels redundant and its simpler for me, but i guess some people can see it as annoying...
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  If you're in the car, it's nice, but it simply doesn't work.. So what d you do? You first struggle 2 minutes with the phone, and fixing all the mess it made, and then just pick up the phone and quickly type a message in 10 seconds. With or without autofrustrate
noobermin 4y ago
Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. I don't know why everyone isn't using NNs and the likes as augments to existing code so that they keep what already works fine, but rather, they feel they can just replace it, which leads to all the problems we see now in Google, in autocorrect, and so on.
- carlmr 4y ago
  >Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. The problem is that if you do machine learning, you just throw data at it to correct wrong behaviors. It's difficult to marry this with a logical approach, like dictionary frequency. Which one do you weight how much? 50:50? What if the user dislikes one of the two models more often, do you add another layer of machine learning here?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    remember Watson in jeopardy? Even when it got the question wrong you’d often see the right answer in the list of possibilities it showed. Users need a way to train/override the ML to “fix” mistakes.
solumos 4y ago
I recently switched from Android to Apple, and this was a big difference that I noticed. I think Google/Android still use a "simple lookup" dictionary (or similar) that updates based on your own behavior, while Apple's suggestions are sometimes non-sensical, and harder to correct (happens to me when typing domains ending in ".xyz" a lot - they get autocorrected to ".cuz")
greesil 4y ago
High Quakers are more fun.
midoridensha 4y ago
>At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. >For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why?? We need to organize and get a huge number of people to start sending text messages one day, using the autocorrect as it works, and not correcting the autocorrect. Just let it put whatever words it wants in there, and send those messages, no matter how nonsensical they are. If everyone just does this for a week, it'll completely ruin these companies' ML models and they'll be forced to switch back to simpler autocorrect implementations that are actually useful.
- spikej 4y ago
  My 2 and 5 year olds do this every night after talking to grandparents. The paragraphs they produce are pure nonsense
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    Have you submitted them to https://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ https://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/?
- margalabargala 4y ago
  What difference would this make? Using the ML model's output as input would merely make the model think it is indeed correct. The ML models would not be ruined beyond how they already are. And if their current state is insufficient to force anything, this would just be more of the same.
- jorgesborges 4y ago
  > Sorry for the inconvenience caused to your order. Our customer is aware of the situation in the area and will be able to help resolve it. Starting with only the word sorry. interesting that it went down a customer service path. It started suggesting corporate speak. > Nature is a religion that has been around since ancient times but it is now being used to promote a culture of diversity in society that has not yet developed. Starting with nature. Wow, deep stuff. > I think you should do some research before making a post about the new game. I have played a lot with my wife but she doesn’t have a clue. Don’t have a wife.
eloisius 4y ago
> For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why?? Do you have an app called Quaker something installed? I had to disable predictive text because after installing the “YouBike 1.0” app my phone refused to let me type the number 10. It always got replaced with 1.0 no matter how many times I tried to correct it.
- js2 4y ago
  Try Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Map “10” to “10”. It’s the only way I could get iOS to stop correcting fucking to ducking. (Lol, it just tried to correct ducking to fucking and I had to override it.)
- adastra22 4y ago
  You can disable predictive text?!? Teach me your ways!
  - eloisius 4y ago
    Settings > General > Keyboards, near the bottom there is a toggle for Predictive.
    - cpdean 4y ago
      the unfortunate thing about this is you lose the three suggested words at the top of the keyboard if you want to get rid of the rewrite feature. the suggested words are sometimes not correct, but jesus ducking christ just let me opt in if it’s useful in the moment!
      - dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
        I set up an auto-correct for 'ducking' to replace it back to what you actually want to say. Also whilst Apple is reading this, please stop changing "were" to "we're" out of context. Ugh.
- throwsec7492 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vachina 4y ago
Sometimes I’d type out a correct spelling of a word and it’d correct it to another word that’s totally unrelated to the context of the sentence, like your Quake example. Infuriating when in a rush.
- robbiep 4y ago
  Mine throws in random French words that look like the medical words I was aiming for. Also for a 3 month period it was auto-correcting ’thé’ to ‘teh’ - i had to train it out of it by spending around half an hour just entering and cancelling the auto correct in notepad on both my computer and phone (because they’re linked) Edit… oh dear, it may have discovered another association I don’t want it to have
  - atkailash 4y ago
    Ugh this happens to me all the time. Earlier I typed pre-sale and it put pré-salé for some reason, and it’s in English keyboard. Why have separate ones if you’re just gonna mush the auto together anyway?
    - anon_123g987 4y ago
      Your comments are not visible because you were shadowbanned years ago. You should create a new account.
      - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
        atkailash's comment is visible to me.
        anon_123g987 4y ago
        Because I vouched for it. Turn on "showdead" in your settings and look at his profile.
        4y ago
Semaphor 4y ago
As happy as I normally would be to laugh at Apple misfortune, everything in this thread including your comment could be about Android, and it would still sound true in my experience :(
- girvo 4y ago
  Yeah, they're remarkably similar in this frustration, though have their own weird quirks around it in terms of implementation issues. Drives me crazy on every one of my devices.
deepGem 4y ago
This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.
- weinzierl 4y ago
  In my experience suggestions also depend on the selected keyboard. When I type German on the English keyboad, autocorrect is terrible. I tried switching keyboards for a while but that did not work for me. The reason is that the placement of common letters (a to z) is subtly different between layouts and that skyrockets the error rate of my typing.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    Does the iPhone not have an easy way to switch between keyboards? I just swipe left/right on the space bar to switch between Norwegian and English keyboards - but my phone isn't an iphone.
    - weinzierl 4y ago
      I has, but the issue is that the layout if the common keys (like letters a to z) is ever so slightly different that it wrecks my typing when I switch.
      - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
        You can switch the layout in the keyboard setting. Most languages have a qwerty variant.
    - oriolid 4y ago
      If you have several languages configured, there's a globe icon that lets you switch between keyboards. It's still a step down from Android that seems to just detect the language even if you switch mid-sentence.
8ytecoder 4y ago
I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520
- rmnclmnt 4y ago
  The beauty of heuristics / expert-rules based AI. Understandable, easy, fast.
  - specialist 4y ago
    Yup. Heuristics over algorithms is The Correct Answer™ (for UX). I once wrote a bespoke query parser for an in-house full text search app. Spent most of my time doing fit and finish for the domain specific stuff. Looked at logs of actual user searches, before and after. Even did usability testing. (Who does that any more?) End result was "invisible", because it just worked. Totally unattainable if I'd relied solely on stock tool stack.
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  The gem in that tweet screed is this comment: > This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection “guess wrong” and erroneously fix broken typing. I work on automation a lot, and this is so hard to communicate to the endless stream of non-tech types that just want to “tweak” the algorithms to be a little bit smarter. Trust is an asymmetric proposition, requires lots of positive inputs to slowly accrete it; it takes very few negative inputs to rapidly dissolve it. It is better to be reliably/predictably helpful some of the time, than it is to usually be helpful but sometimes dishelpful all of the time. Or as Thumper put it (kinda): “If you don’t have nuthin nice to add, don’t add anything at all.”
  - Y_Y 4y ago
    I agree and see Thumper's Law as a combination of the Principle of Least Surprise and the concept of Loss Aversion in the sense that a pleasant surprise, like a correctly guessing what you were going to type, is greatly outweighed by the pain of an unpleasant surprise, like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.
novok 4y ago
Reminds me of how much worse siri is getting every year, where it bit flips what I say to the opposite. Makes me think they're using ML models for everything which never gets anything right with %99.9 accuracy. "Hey siri turn off the bedroom lights", "Ok, turning on the bedroom". Recently tried alexa again with an old echo dot and it worked way better with basic things like I remembered it. Super sad.
- projektfu 4y ago
  Siri has languished in nifty feature hell. Apple bought it to look futuristic but hasn't made it useful. "Hey Siri, check my messages on WhatsApp" "You'll have to unlock your phone" If I could handle the phone right now I wouldn't be asking.... "hey Siri, what commands do you know?" "I can't do that." "Hey Siri, remind me to call Bill on Thursday" (tiny pause before on Thursday with continuation sounds like "uh") "Ok I set a reminder to call Bill." "Change to Call Bill on Thursday" [Adds "On Thursday" to the title] All of these things are much better handled by Alexa or Google. Alexa does need a two word command introducer though. It joins into conversations randomly by mistaking words for "Alexa".
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Siri is unusable except for the following: - open an app. (Say Apple Podcasts, otherwise it'll open deezer) - call a contact (but randomly replaces your most frequently called person with someone I've spoken 10+ years ago) - set a timer - set an alarm that's really it. Reminders work like shit, exactly like you said. If siri doesn't know what to do with a contact, it asks you what you wanna do, and then doesn't understand it. I turn all this crap off as much as I can. Just a bunch of wasted dev-time, battery-time, and chip/die realestate which could be used for anything else.
- lancesells 4y ago
  My Siri experience seems to degrade over time. Months ago all my lights used to respond individually. "Turn on the floor lamp in the living room" would turn on the lamp. Now that command turns on all lights in the living room. Last week my HomePod started responding with "uh-huh" within .5 seconds of it hearing "Hey Siri" well before it's given me a chance to actually say anything. And then there's so much trouble with connecting to the internet or even setting an alarm. Like setting a timer needs to connect to the internet even when there are zero issues with my connection. Please give me a local DumbPod.
ano-ther 4y ago
When the iPhone came out, I still had a Blackberry. The auto-type was much superior even back then. It would easily recognize and complete phrases, so “k” would expand with a few clicks to “Kind regards, $firstname $lastname”. On the iPhone today, it takes at least three chars to start noting that I want to insert my last name (pretty frequent in forms).
itronitron 4y ago
In my opinion, they should limit the text fields that auto-correct to a very limited set of applications. It becomes very problematic when attempting to type words in a foreign language. Just last week I was attempting to type a foreign word into a translate box on a webpage in Safari and the browser or page kept removing characters I had entered, presumably it was proactively auto-correcting but it was completely unpredictable because it also seemed to retain all the letters I had typed even though it was also removing them from the text field.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Or some press-hold-stop autocorrecting this field. I hate when it autocorrects e-mail addresses for some reason
  - projektfu 4y ago
    I have my e-mail address as a text replacement. It works ... about 1/10 of the time. The Apple keyboard didn't show text replacements when it wanted to suggest a password. (Not sure if that's still true). The google keyboard is just flaky about using the replacements. I'm usually stuck manually typing through it and fighting autocorrect, sometimes without the benefit of autocorrect suggestions. Meanwhile, I had to delete the omw replacement which, 100% of the time, replaced with the overly enthusiastic "On my way!".
stouset 4y ago
Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix. If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again, for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid. This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this as a full-blown Apple apologist.
- just_a_username 4y ago
  many versions of iOS ago - if you deleted the autocorrect word, it suggested above the keys the original word it replaced, which made it very easy to get back to where you originally were. they then removed this a few years ago. utterly baffling how over-engineered and regressive it has become
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.
  - iroddis 4y ago
    This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll. Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device. Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.
    - nawgz 4y ago
      Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?
      - llamaimperative 4y ago
jbverschoor 4y ago
It's not just the keyboard. It's also siri.. I tell siri to call XXXXXXX. I see on my screen it actually understood me, and then it changed the name into someone else who I never ever call. Alls this "ai" stuff drives me crazy. It's just plain unpredictable. I prefer predictability in my daily drivers, and I'll go for "ai" when I need it.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Siri was great when it first came out. At some point it went machine AI and sometimes it works well but most of the time it is absolutely annoyingly batshit insane. My current fun one is “turn off bathroom lights” will cause it to ask downstairs or upstairs and loop forever no matter what you say at that point. Then I have to get up and press a light switch like a Neanderthal!
P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
Thank you for explaining this, I've had the same experience as the OP so was very interested when I saw the title. And I echo their sentiment that the 1st gen SE is the best phone I've ever had. Just bought 3rd gen SE (hardware on the 1st gen SE was dying) and while it's decent, I really miss the form factor of the original. The very first thing I do in VS is to disable the git plugin and the AI assisted autocomplete. I've never found that autocomplete to be better than having the ability to predict what autocomplete was going to suggest.

mathieuh 4y ago

Do people actually send messages to each other like that? I modified all the precomposed replies on my watch to remove capitals and punctuation. Using capitals and punctuation raises the register of the message for me, and 99% of the time if I’m sending a text it’s to friends or family.

odysseus 4y ago
What does "raises the register" in this context mean?
- dopidopHN 4y ago
  Register of speak I suppose ? Formal, vulgar, technical, casual... I might be wrong English is not my first language. But that would fits nicely. I understand that as going from casual to formal, for instance.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    “Raise the bar” would be the colloquially used term around here.
- rattus_rattus 4y ago
  It means the formality level of text. I think that person was saying that within their family chats, they perceive that using capitals and punctuation makes the messages feel unnecessarily/inappropriately formal.
  - mathieuh 4y ago
    Yes exactly.
Lio 4y ago
I normally wouldn’t say anything but since it’s the topic of conversation, I hate that. I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression. Depends on your circle of friends I guess.
- mathieuh 4y ago
  I think it's not unreasonable to expect there to be written dialects as well as spoken ones. A comparatively huge amount of a person's communication is written these days, where previously it would have been face-to-face or with a phone call. The general spoken register where I live skews informal, so I assume this has carried over to written communication. Using capitals and punctuation comes across to me as stilted and like an email or a letter rather than a text message. It's an interesting subject definitely
- andrekandre 4y ago
  > I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation as passive aggression. interesting, why does it seem as passive aggression? for me upper/lowercase just feels redundant and its simpler for me, but i guess some people can see it as annoying...
jbverschoor 4y ago
If you're in the car, it's nice, but it simply doesn't work.. So what d you do? You first struggle 2 minutes with the phone, and fixing all the mess it made, and then just pick up the phone and quickly type a message in 10 seconds. With or without autofrustrate

noobermin 4y ago

Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. I don't know why everyone isn't using NNs and the likes as augments to existing code so that they keep what already works fine, but rather, they feel they can just replace it, which leads to all the problems we see now in Google, in autocorrect, and so on.

carlmr 4y ago
>Machine learning is powerful in many domains, but it's giving engineers license to be lazy. The problem is that if you do machine learning, you just throw data at it to correct wrong behaviors. It's difficult to marry this with a logical approach, like dictionary frequency. Which one do you weight how much? 50:50? What if the user dislikes one of the two models more often, do you add another layer of machine learning here?
- bombcar 4y ago
  remember Watson in jeopardy? Even when it got the question wrong you’d often see the right answer in the list of possibilities it showed. Users need a way to train/override the ML to “fix” mistakes.

solumos 4y ago

I recently switched from Android to Apple, and this was a big difference that I noticed. I think Google/Android still use a "simple lookup" dictionary (or similar) that updates based on your own behavior, while Apple's suggestions are sometimes non-sensical, and harder to correct (happens to me when typing domains ending in ".xyz" a lot - they get autocorrected to ".cuz")

greesil 4y ago

High Quakers are more fun.

midoridensha 4y ago

>At some point I recall Apple announcing that they had switched autocorrect to a full machine learning implementation. >For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why?? We need to organize and get a huge number of people to start sending text messages one day, using the autocorrect as it works, and not correcting the autocorrect. Just let it put whatever words it wants in there, and send those messages, no matter how nonsensical they are. If everyone just does this for a week, it'll completely ruin these companies' ML models and they'll be forced to switch back to simpler autocorrect implementations that are actually useful.

spikej 4y ago
My 2 and 5 year olds do this every night after talking to grandparents. The paragraphs they produce are pure nonsense
- wizofaus 4y ago
  Have you submitted them to https://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/ https://www.damnyouautocorrect.com/?
margalabargala 4y ago
What difference would this make? Using the ML model's output as input would merely make the model think it is indeed correct. The ML models would not be ruined beyond how they already are. And if their current state is insufficient to force anything, this would just be more of the same.
jorgesborges 4y ago
> Sorry for the inconvenience caused to your order. Our customer is aware of the situation in the area and will be able to help resolve it. Starting with only the word sorry. interesting that it went down a customer service path. It started suggesting corporate speak. > Nature is a religion that has been around since ancient times but it is now being used to promote a culture of diversity in society that has not yet developed. Starting with nature. Wow, deep stuff. > I think you should do some research before making a post about the new game. I have played a lot with my wife but she doesn’t have a clue. Don’t have a wife.

eloisius 4y ago

> For example it just tried to sub-in “Quaker” for “quality” in the previous sentence. Why?? Do you have an app called Quaker something installed? I had to disable predictive text because after installing the “YouBike 1.0” app my phone refused to let me type the number 10. It always got replaced with 1.0 no matter how many times I tried to correct it.

js2 4y ago
Try Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement. Map “10” to “10”. It’s the only way I could get iOS to stop correcting fucking to ducking. (Lol, it just tried to correct ducking to fucking and I had to override it.)
adastra22 4y ago
You can disable predictive text?!? Teach me your ways!
- eloisius 4y ago
  Settings > General > Keyboards, near the bottom there is a toggle for Predictive.
  - cpdean 4y ago
    the unfortunate thing about this is you lose the three suggested words at the top of the keyboard if you want to get rid of the rewrite feature. the suggested words are sometimes not correct, but jesus ducking christ just let me opt in if it’s useful in the moment!
    - dhsysusbsjsi 4y ago
      I set up an auto-correct for 'ducking' to replace it back to what you actually want to say. Also whilst Apple is reading this, please stop changing "were" to "we're" out of context. Ugh.
throwsec7492 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vachina 4y ago

Sometimes I’d type out a correct spelling of a word and it’d correct it to another word that’s totally unrelated to the context of the sentence, like your Quake example. Infuriating when in a rush.

robbiep 4y ago
Mine throws in random French words that look like the medical words I was aiming for. Also for a 3 month period it was auto-correcting ’thé’ to ‘teh’ - i had to train it out of it by spending around half an hour just entering and cancelling the auto correct in notepad on both my computer and phone (because they’re linked) Edit… oh dear, it may have discovered another association I don’t want it to have
- atkailash 4y ago
  Ugh this happens to me all the time. Earlier I typed pre-sale and it put pré-salé for some reason, and it’s in English keyboard. Why have separate ones if you’re just gonna mush the auto together anyway?
  - anon_123g987 4y ago
    Your comments are not visible because you were shadowbanned years ago. You should create a new account.
    - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
      atkailash's comment is visible to me.
      - anon_123g987 4y ago
        Because I vouched for it. Turn on "showdead" in your settings and look at his profile.
        4y ago

Semaphor 4y ago

As happy as I normally would be to laugh at Apple misfortune, everything in this thread including your comment could be about Android, and it would still sound true in my experience :(

girvo 4y ago
Yeah, they're remarkably similar in this frustration, though have their own weird quirks around it in terms of implementation issues. Drives me crazy on every one of my devices.

deepGem 4y ago

This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.

weinzierl 4y ago
In my experience suggestions also depend on the selected keyboard. When I type German on the English keyboad, autocorrect is terrible. I tried switching keyboards for a while but that did not work for me. The reason is that the placement of common letters (a to z) is subtly different between layouts and that skyrockets the error rate of my typing.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Does the iPhone not have an easy way to switch between keyboards? I just swipe left/right on the space bar to switch between Norwegian and English keyboards - but my phone isn't an iphone.
  - weinzierl 4y ago
    I has, but the issue is that the layout if the common keys (like letters a to z) is ever so slightly different that it wrecks my typing when I switch.
    - WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      You can switch the layout in the keyboard setting. Most languages have a qwerty variant.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    If you have several languages configured, there's a globe icon that lets you switch between keyboards. It's still a step down from Android that seems to just detect the language even if you switch mid-sentence.

8ytecoder 4y ago

I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520 https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

rmnclmnt 4y ago
The beauty of heuristics / expert-rules based AI. Understandable, easy, fast.
- specialist 4y ago
  Yup. Heuristics over algorithms is The Correct Answer™ (for UX). I once wrote a bespoke query parser for an in-house full text search app. Spent most of my time doing fit and finish for the domain specific stuff. Looked at logs of actual user searches, before and after. Even did usability testing. (Who does that any more?) End result was "invisible", because it just worked. Totally unattainable if I'd relied solely on stock tool stack.
travisgriggs 4y ago
The gem in that tweet screed is this comment: > This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection “guess wrong” and erroneously fix broken typing. I work on automation a lot, and this is so hard to communicate to the endless stream of non-tech types that just want to “tweak” the algorithms to be a little bit smarter. Trust is an asymmetric proposition, requires lots of positive inputs to slowly accrete it; it takes very few negative inputs to rapidly dissolve it. It is better to be reliably/predictably helpful some of the time, than it is to usually be helpful but sometimes dishelpful all of the time. Or as Thumper put it (kinda): “If you don’t have nuthin nice to add, don’t add anything at all.”
- Y_Y 4y ago
  I agree and see Thumper's Law as a combination of the Principle of Least Surprise and the concept of Loss Aversion in the sense that a pleasant surprise, like a correctly guessing what you were going to type, is greatly outweighed by the pain of an unpleasant surprise, like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.

novok 4y ago

Reminds me of how much worse siri is getting every year, where it bit flips what I say to the opposite. Makes me think they're using ML models for everything which never gets anything right with %99.9 accuracy. "Hey siri turn off the bedroom lights", "Ok, turning on the bedroom". Recently tried alexa again with an old echo dot and it worked way better with basic things like I remembered it. Super sad.

projektfu 4y ago
Siri has languished in nifty feature hell. Apple bought it to look futuristic but hasn't made it useful. "Hey Siri, check my messages on WhatsApp" "You'll have to unlock your phone" If I could handle the phone right now I wouldn't be asking.... "hey Siri, what commands do you know?" "I can't do that." "Hey Siri, remind me to call Bill on Thursday" (tiny pause before on Thursday with continuation sounds like "uh") "Ok I set a reminder to call Bill." "Change to Call Bill on Thursday" [Adds "On Thursday" to the title] All of these things are much better handled by Alexa or Google. Alexa does need a two word command introducer though. It joins into conversations randomly by mistaking words for "Alexa".
- jbverschoor 4y ago
  Siri is unusable except for the following: - open an app. (Say Apple Podcasts, otherwise it'll open deezer) - call a contact (but randomly replaces your most frequently called person with someone I've spoken 10+ years ago) - set a timer - set an alarm that's really it. Reminders work like shit, exactly like you said. If siri doesn't know what to do with a contact, it asks you what you wanna do, and then doesn't understand it. I turn all this crap off as much as I can. Just a bunch of wasted dev-time, battery-time, and chip/die realestate which could be used for anything else.
lancesells 4y ago
My Siri experience seems to degrade over time. Months ago all my lights used to respond individually. "Turn on the floor lamp in the living room" would turn on the lamp. Now that command turns on all lights in the living room. Last week my HomePod started responding with "uh-huh" within .5 seconds of it hearing "Hey Siri" well before it's given me a chance to actually say anything. And then there's so much trouble with connecting to the internet or even setting an alarm. Like setting a timer needs to connect to the internet even when there are zero issues with my connection. Please give me a local DumbPod.

ano-ther 4y ago

When the iPhone came out, I still had a Blackberry. The auto-type was much superior even back then. It would easily recognize and complete phrases, so “k” would expand with a few clicks to “Kind regards, $firstname $lastname”. On the iPhone today, it takes at least three chars to start noting that I want to insert my last name (pretty frequent in forms).

itronitron 4y ago

In my opinion, they should limit the text fields that auto-correct to a very limited set of applications. It becomes very problematic when attempting to type words in a foreign language. Just last week I was attempting to type a foreign word into a translate box on a webpage in Safari and the browser or page kept removing characters I had entered, presumably it was proactively auto-correcting but it was completely unpredictable because it also seemed to retain all the letters I had typed even though it was also removing them from the text field.

bombcar 4y ago
Or some press-hold-stop autocorrecting this field. I hate when it autocorrects e-mail addresses for some reason
- projektfu 4y ago
  I have my e-mail address as a text replacement. It works ... about 1/10 of the time. The Apple keyboard didn't show text replacements when it wanted to suggest a password. (Not sure if that's still true). The google keyboard is just flaky about using the replacements. I'm usually stuck manually typing through it and fighting autocorrect, sometimes without the benefit of autocorrect suggestions. Meanwhile, I had to delete the omw replacement which, 100% of the time, replaced with the overly enthusiastic "On my way!".

stouset 4y ago

Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix. If I type some letters, it autocorrects, I explicitly backspace to delete the autocorrection, and then type the exact same thing again, for the love of god stop “helpfully” correcting it for me again to the exact same thing I just undid. This seems like such low-hanging fruit it's baffling that it's still an issue and I say this as a full-blown Apple apologist.

just_a_username 4y ago
many versions of iOS ago - if you deleted the autocorrect word, it suggested above the keys the original word it replaced, which made it very easy to get back to where you originally were. they then removed this a few years ago. utterly baffling how over-engineered and regressive it has become
cassianoleal 4y ago
I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.
- iroddis 4y ago
  This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll. Unfortunately, when I got a Mac laptop, those replacements were synched and for some reason can’t be disabled on just one device. Now I’m back to autocorrect, fighting with the AI to learn technical terms and command line entries for when I need to talk to colleagues over chat.
  - nawgz 4y ago
    Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?
    - llamaimperative 4y ago

jbverschoor 4y ago

It's not just the keyboard. It's also siri.. I tell siri to call XXXXXXX. I see on my screen it actually understood me, and then it changed the name into someone else who I never ever call. Alls this "ai" stuff drives me crazy. It's just plain unpredictable. I prefer predictability in my daily drivers, and I'll go for "ai" when I need it.

bombcar 4y ago
Siri was great when it first came out. At some point it went machine AI and sometimes it works well but most of the time it is absolutely annoyingly batshit insane. My current fun one is “turn off bathroom lights” will cause it to ask downstairs or upstairs and loop forever no matter what you say at that point. Then I have to get up and press a light switch like a Neanderthal!

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago

Thank you for explaining this, I've had the same experience as the OP so was very interested when I saw the title. And I echo their sentiment that the 1st gen SE is the best phone I've ever had. Just bought 3rd gen SE (hardware on the 1st gen SE was dying) and while it's decent, I really miss the form factor of the original. The very first thing I do in VS is to disable the git plugin and the AI assisted autocomplete. I've never found that autocomplete to be better than having the ability to predict what autocomplete was going to suggest.