7 ms·

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this experience? 1. https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/typoglycemia/

dlivingston 1y ago
I run into this all the time. I've just given up on the built-in spell checker and search the word in Google now.
nicce 1y ago
Bit off-topic - macOS has excellent built-in dictionary. Just select the word in any app, press Ctrl+Command+D and it opens it. It even guesses most incorrect words correctly. Also translation available if it exist for current keyboard locales. E.g. > No entries for "typoglycemia", did you mean "hypoglycemia"?
- bee_rider 1y ago
  These user activated dictionaries tend to be excellent (even in vim, a pretty barebones system, I tend to get fantastic guesses from the machine). Actually, come to think of it, the problem must be a bit easier than on smartphones, right? Real keyboard input is very precise. Smartphone keyboards already guess what word you were trying to spell, so they are influencing the typos in the direction of likely words… cannibalizing the very guess list that the dictionary uses!
- paradox460 1y ago
  Alfred ties into it nicely too, you can type `spell someword` and the completions below have the various spellings of words, fuzzy matched. Select one and the word goes onto your clipboard
- qmr 1y ago
  There's also a gesture. Triple three finger tap or some such like.
  - nicce 1y ago
    I think it is actually hard press with single finger.
- socalgal2 1y ago
  that's great. I usually use the context menu on MacOS and the "Define" option on long press on iOS That said, trying to use long press on iOS (or whatever it actually is), is one of those places that often drives me nuts. I don't know if the issue is a specific app or the OS or what but sometimes I want the popup menu to appear and I can't get it to appear. Or I do something to make it appear but it doesn't appear for x hundred milliseconds, during which I think it didn't get my gesture so I start a new one, just as it's finally responding in which case my new gesture dismisses it. Repeat 3-4 times before I'm ready to tear my hair out It also shows why canvas based websites suck. Open Google Docs, select a word, press Cmd-Ctrl-D, ... nothing. Try it in gmail (which is not canvas based) and it works.
moi2388 1y ago
I have the same experience. Some things I’ve noticed: - they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind. - they do not look at context at all - they focus too much on the first letter of the word for suggestions
- bapak 1y ago
  > they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind. Not true anymore, I just typed fuck in this comment without having to fight it. They made a change I think last year and they even announced it. > they do not look at context at all Also not true. It's true that they're not perfect at it, but replacement after you typed 2 more words happen specifically because it can tell better what you want to say. Sometimes works against you because language is highly personal.
- alpaca128 1y ago
  > they focus too much on the first letter of the word They also do that in Apple Notes. On the iPad the search can only match word prefixes. So if you type "oo" and the entire note consists of just the word "foo", it will find nothing. This doesn't even require fuzzy search, yet they couldn't be bothered while solving the much more difficult handwriting recognition problem. Also the iPhone's Settings app still doesn't have all settings in the search index. So it's impossible to find the section "headphone safety" & "reduce loud audio" using words like "headphone", "audio" or "safety". This setting was introduced five years ago, by the way.
torium 1y ago
Wouldn't typoglycemia be lack of typos in your blood? Don't you mean the opposite?
- Twisol 1y ago
  "Hypo", meaning low; "glyc-", meaning sugar; and "emia", meaning of the blood. "Low sugar of the blood". (With apologies to chubbyemu.) Since "typo" comes from "typography", it roughly means "symbolic". So "typoglycemia" should mean "symbolic sugar of the blood". Low typos in your blood would be "hypotypemia". I have no idea why "typoglycemia" refers to a human ability to autocorrect, but it brings me joy, so I'm not going to question it ^_^
  - torium 1y ago
    Funny that we know the same obscure youtuber.
    - golem14 1y ago
      Really not so obscure: 3.17M subscribers.
bcrl 1y ago
I'd be happier if the suggested word didn't move between the time I saw it appear and the time my finger touched the screen.
AnotherGoodName 1y ago
Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances with threads from others on the same issues on Apple devices. From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar to the crappy spell check and crappy spam filtering. As much as Jobs apparently came across as an asshole there’s a need for someone at the top to say ‘WTF is this, fix it or get fired!’.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".
  - ww520 1y ago
    Or the incentive aligned.
    - SkyPuncher 1y ago
      This is really what it is.
  - abullinan 1y ago
    It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.
    - ttoinou 1y ago
      Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?
jmkni 1y ago
There's nothing more frustrating than when you type the word you want to type, it changes it to a different word, you delete it and type the word you wanted to type again and then rinse/repeat 3 to 4 times before you have the word you actually wanted. And if you're not paying attention, your message ends up looking like you're having a stroke.
- mikestew 1y ago
  It used to be that if you typed, deleted the correction, and retyped, that spelling would now be the preferred and you wouldn’t have to play that game anymore. Apple broke that years ago.
porridgeraisin 1y ago
Meanwhile, vim's spell checker is one of the best I have used. I recommend reading [:h spell](https://vimhelp.org/spell.txt.html#spell https://vimhelp.org/spell.txt.html#spell). Here are some nice examples (excluding obvious edit distance based ones which it does right) "snowbalfight" --> "snowball fight" "unrelevant" --> "irrelevant" "fone" --> "phone" "the the" --> "The" And all of this with auto capitalization if it notices you're at the start of a sentence, and stuff like handling proper nouns, punctuations, etc,. What I find really interesting is swipe-type spell checking (its basically word prediction) on phones. That is a really cool problem to solve well. Sometimes it works like a dream and other times it's annoying. I wonder how they write those.
bell-cot 1y ago
> Is there a reason why ... Yes: Apple doesn't care. > Does anyone else... Yes. I just typed in "Tipografical earer" - and iOS 18.6 suggested "Tipograxical" for the first word, and one of "eared", "eager", and "eater" for the second word.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
uticus 1y ago
emoticons
el_benhameen 1y ago
I have definitely noticed this too. I also use the built in swipe to type feature, and it may as well be a coin flip as to whether it gets the word right. I get that swiping is vague, but even a little bit of frequency prediction would tell you that “sounds good” is going to be more likely than “sings hood”. It’s an absolutely infuriating feature.
- cmckn 1y ago
  This drives me insane. I use the swipe feature because I guess I have wide fingertips and frequently hit unintended, adjacent keys when pecking on the keyboard (especially as I’ve gotten older). The words produced by swiping often make no grammatical sense, and are frequently esoteric words that I just can’t believe rank high enough on a basic frequency list to suggest. Not to mention my own vocabulary, which apparently is not considered by the keyboard at all. I had a way better experience using SwiftKey on my android phone 15 years ago.
fluidcruft 1y ago
I feel the same way about Android's. It just seems like spell check used to be so much better then years ago. But I'm not sure whether it's comparing mobile with desktop expectations. It really seems extremely dumb on Android.
- alpaca128 1y ago
  When I used Windows Phone 8.1 I felt like I was typing text twice as fast as on Android. Better suggestions, more accurate keyboard inputs on the same screen size, and selecting an entire word was just a single tap which made fixing a typo very quick as well. Meanwhile back then it was impossible to make certain text selections without a bluetooth keyboard because of how Android constantly tried "fixing" touch-based selections. It's sad that Microsoft shut down the only system & UI that felt like the developers were actually thinking of the user when designing it. To this day no other mobile OS is as friendly to left-handed users.
nwellinghoff 1y ago
The spell check is truly bad. It boggles the mind how this is even possible given how solved the problem is everywhere else. Also the period being to the right of the spacebar such that it gets hit instead of space. So annoying!
eru 1y ago
> Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? It's somewhat funny that human performance is seen as a baseline here, and not the pinnacle of achievement to aim for. (I agree with you. I just find it entertaining.)
reissbaker 1y ago
I mean, TBH I would expect this to be true: an LLM is trained over a massive corpus of internet data, which contains many typos, and is required to accurately predict tokens despite edit errors. A spellchecker is typically running a deterministic algorithm really, really quickly, and has hardcoded limits on acceptable edit distance (and has no learned knowledge of what looks correct/incorrect to human eyes). An LLM should generally trounce a spellchecker at figuring out what you meant to type, unless the spellchecker is secretly a tiny LLM / ML model of some kind under the hood.

dlivingston 1y ago

I run into this all the time. I've just given up on the built-in spell checker and search the word in Google now.

nicce 1y ago

Bit off-topic - macOS has excellent built-in dictionary. Just select the word in any app, press Ctrl+Command+D and it opens it. It even guesses most incorrect words correctly. Also translation available if it exist for current keyboard locales. E.g. > No entries for "typoglycemia", did you mean "hypoglycemia"?

bee_rider 1y ago
These user activated dictionaries tend to be excellent (even in vim, a pretty barebones system, I tend to get fantastic guesses from the machine). Actually, come to think of it, the problem must be a bit easier than on smartphones, right? Real keyboard input is very precise. Smartphone keyboards already guess what word you were trying to spell, so they are influencing the typos in the direction of likely words… cannibalizing the very guess list that the dictionary uses!
paradox460 1y ago
Alfred ties into it nicely too, you can type `spell someword` and the completions below have the various spellings of words, fuzzy matched. Select one and the word goes onto your clipboard
qmr 1y ago
There's also a gesture. Triple three finger tap or some such like.
- nicce 1y ago
  I think it is actually hard press with single finger.
socalgal2 1y ago
that's great. I usually use the context menu on MacOS and the "Define" option on long press on iOS That said, trying to use long press on iOS (or whatever it actually is), is one of those places that often drives me nuts. I don't know if the issue is a specific app or the OS or what but sometimes I want the popup menu to appear and I can't get it to appear. Or I do something to make it appear but it doesn't appear for x hundred milliseconds, during which I think it didn't get my gesture so I start a new one, just as it's finally responding in which case my new gesture dismisses it. Repeat 3-4 times before I'm ready to tear my hair out It also shows why canvas based websites suck. Open Google Docs, select a word, press Cmd-Ctrl-D, ... nothing. Try it in gmail (which is not canvas based) and it works.

moi2388 1y ago

I have the same experience. Some things I’ve noticed: - they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind. - they do not look at context at all - they focus too much on the first letter of the word for suggestions

bapak 1y ago
> they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind. Not true anymore, I just typed fuck in this comment without having to fight it. They made a change I think last year and they even announced it. > they do not look at context at all Also not true. It's true that they're not perfect at it, but replacement after you typed 2 more words happen specifically because it can tell better what you want to say. Sometimes works against you because language is highly personal.
alpaca128 1y ago
> they focus too much on the first letter of the word They also do that in Apple Notes. On the iPad the search can only match word prefixes. So if you type "oo" and the entire note consists of just the word "foo", it will find nothing. This doesn't even require fuzzy search, yet they couldn't be bothered while solving the much more difficult handwriting recognition problem. Also the iPhone's Settings app still doesn't have all settings in the search index. So it's impossible to find the section "headphone safety" & "reduce loud audio" using words like "headphone", "audio" or "safety". This setting was introduced five years ago, by the way.

torium 1y ago

Wouldn't typoglycemia be lack of typos in your blood? Don't you mean the opposite?

Twisol 1y ago
"Hypo", meaning low; "glyc-", meaning sugar; and "emia", meaning of the blood. "Low sugar of the blood". (With apologies to chubbyemu.) Since "typo" comes from "typography", it roughly means "symbolic". So "typoglycemia" should mean "symbolic sugar of the blood". Low typos in your blood would be "hypotypemia". I have no idea why "typoglycemia" refers to a human ability to autocorrect, but it brings me joy, so I'm not going to question it ^_^
- torium 1y ago
  Funny that we know the same obscure youtuber.
  - golem14 1y ago
    Really not so obscure: 3.17M subscribers.

bcrl 1y ago

I'd be happier if the suggested word didn't move between the time I saw it appear and the time my finger touched the screen.

AnotherGoodName 1y ago

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances with threads from others on the same issues on Apple devices. From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar to the crappy spell check and crappy spam filtering. As much as Jobs apparently came across as an asshole there’s a need for someone at the top to say ‘WTF is this, fix it or get fired!’.

IshKebab 1y ago
I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".
- ww520 1y ago
  Or the incentive aligned.
  - SkyPuncher 1y ago
    This is really what it is.
- abullinan 1y ago
  It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.
  - ttoinou 1y ago
    Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?

jmkni 1y ago

There's nothing more frustrating than when you type the word you want to type, it changes it to a different word, you delete it and type the word you wanted to type again and then rinse/repeat 3 to 4 times before you have the word you actually wanted. And if you're not paying attention, your message ends up looking like you're having a stroke.

mikestew 1y ago
It used to be that if you typed, deleted the correction, and retyped, that spelling would now be the preferred and you wouldn’t have to play that game anymore. Apple broke that years ago.

porridgeraisin 1y ago

Meanwhile, vim's spell checker is one of the best I have used. I recommend reading [:h spell](https://vimhelp.org/spell.txt.html#spell https://vimhelp.org/spell.txt.html#spell). Here are some nice examples (excluding obvious edit distance based ones which it does right) "snowbalfight" --> "snowball fight" "unrelevant" --> "irrelevant" "fone" --> "phone" "the the" --> "The" And all of this with auto capitalization if it notices you're at the start of a sentence, and stuff like handling proper nouns, punctuations, etc,. What I find really interesting is swipe-type spell checking (its basically word prediction) on phones. That is a really cool problem to solve well. Sometimes it works like a dream and other times it's annoying. I wonder how they write those.

bell-cot 1y ago

> Is there a reason why ... Yes: Apple doesn't care. > Does anyone else... Yes. I just typed in "Tipografical earer" - and iOS 18.6 suggested "Tipograxical" for the first word, and one of "eared", "eager", and "eater" for the second word.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

uticus 1y ago

emoticons

el_benhameen 1y ago

I have definitely noticed this too. I also use the built in swipe to type feature, and it may as well be a coin flip as to whether it gets the word right. I get that swiping is vague, but even a little bit of frequency prediction would tell you that “sounds good” is going to be more likely than “sings hood”. It’s an absolutely infuriating feature.

cmckn 1y ago
This drives me insane. I use the swipe feature because I guess I have wide fingertips and frequently hit unintended, adjacent keys when pecking on the keyboard (especially as I’ve gotten older). The words produced by swiping often make no grammatical sense, and are frequently esoteric words that I just can’t believe rank high enough on a basic frequency list to suggest. Not to mention my own vocabulary, which apparently is not considered by the keyboard at all. I had a way better experience using SwiftKey on my android phone 15 years ago.

fluidcruft 1y ago

I feel the same way about Android's. It just seems like spell check used to be so much better then years ago. But I'm not sure whether it's comparing mobile with desktop expectations. It really seems extremely dumb on Android.

alpaca128 1y ago
When I used Windows Phone 8.1 I felt like I was typing text twice as fast as on Android. Better suggestions, more accurate keyboard inputs on the same screen size, and selecting an entire word was just a single tap which made fixing a typo very quick as well. Meanwhile back then it was impossible to make certain text selections without a bluetooth keyboard because of how Android constantly tried "fixing" touch-based selections. It's sad that Microsoft shut down the only system & UI that felt like the developers were actually thinking of the user when designing it. To this day no other mobile OS is as friendly to left-handed users.

nwellinghoff 1y ago

The spell check is truly bad. It boggles the mind how this is even possible given how solved the problem is everywhere else. Also the period being to the right of the spacebar such that it gets hit instead of space. So annoying!

eru 1y ago

> Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? It's somewhat funny that human performance is seen as a baseline here, and not the pinnacle of achievement to aim for. (I agree with you. I just find it entertaining.)

reissbaker 1y ago

I mean, TBH I would expect this to be true: an LLM is trained over a massive corpus of internet data, which contains many typos, and is required to accurately predict tokens despite edit errors. A spellchecker is typically running a deterministic algorithm really, really quickly, and has hardcoded limits on acceptable edit distance (and has no learned knowledge of what looks correct/incorrect to human eyes). An LLM should generally trounce a spellchecker at figuring out what you meant to type, unless the spellchecker is secretly a tiny LLM / ML model of some kind under the hood.