Has anyone else noticed that autocorrect/swipe has been getting worse lately?

Part of a strange, larger trend where things get worse as technology advances.

autocorrect, search engine results, google now -> assistant, voice recognition.

All of those seemed to be much better a few years back.

96

Swipe on my gboard has definitely gone worse lately. Same for my YT recommendations. I never ever watch shorts, and 90% of my recommendations are 13sec clips.

42
- That's you assuming they show you what YOU want and not what THEY want you to see.
  
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- My gboard has gotten way worse. I also have 2 languages turned on but I have multilingual suggestions turned off and it still tries to suggest words in the wrong language half the time
  
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- You need to very consistently mark every short video as Not Interested and then avoid watching them like the plague. It worked for me but took about a week of doing it.
  
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- What’s even more annoying is they’re capable of recommending interesting long videos, they purposefully recommend shorter videos on mobile (like less than a minute), on pc they recommend more long videos and the TV app seems to have the most long videos
  
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- There's a firefox plugin to remove shorts from youtube entirely. super worth it.
  
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Something gets good, but the team needs to justify continued pay so they keep developing what doesn't need development.

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My controversial opinion is that cell phone layout designs (not tech) peaked around 2010 and were killed by the iPhone. Don't @ me.

5

1000%.

I’ve noticed across platforms, posts, texts, etc.

My guess is that there’s been a slow infiltration of “AI powered” autocorrect across the industry.

Other than that, I don’t really have a good answer to the broad, sweeping degradation of autocorrect.

But you’re definitely not the only one.

51

I suspect this is what's happening. They've gone from a prescriptive 'pre-programmed' autocorrect to a more AI based 'machine learning' one. Hopefully this means it'll eventually improve, although I don't know why it's taking so long.

(I could be wrong about all of this, of course.)

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- Yeah, this is precisely what I’ve been thinking.
  
  I feel like they gathered data, studied it, and wrote a prescriptive autocorrect that IMO was perfectly fine and was still pretty good at catching words I was most likely to use.
  
  Then, all of a sudden, it turned into fucking scrabble and I find myself going, “WTF are you thinking autocorrect?”
  
  Not sure when the change started but it’s officially shitty now.
  
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- Barring code maintenance, they really had no reason to roll this out until it surpassed the old system. The AI could still train on data gathered while using the old system.
  
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- Yeah, this is precisely what I’ve been thinking.
  
  I feel like they gathered data, studied it, and wrote a prescriptive autocorrect that IMO was perfectly fine and was still pretty good at catching words I was most likely to use.
  
  Then, all of a sudden, it turned into fucking scrabble and I find myself going, “WTF are you thinking autocorrect?”
  
  Not sure when the change started but it’s officially shitty now.
  
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It could even be that as more and more of our lives gets funneled into these machines we're seeing less literacy and therefore more typos to make the algorithms second guess themselves. If 10 users for every 100 type fir instead of for and don't correct it the algo starts to see that as possible correct

12

I texted to my husband " have a good day", and it corrected to " have a good avocado". Have a great avocado everyone!

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Have an idea of what I have a great day and I will be able to see you soon answering the phone if you have to be a good time to call you can see the attached file is scanned image in PDF format the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the

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- What do you think about this guy in a very long way and I don't know if he's a bad person but he doesn't have a problem or a problem or a problem with him and he doesn't want me back. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  
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- Toys outlet to the various back to you and your family and friends is to be a good time and money and you are you doing and what we do it again in case is pending the bear the thought we would love a copy and pasted below is my CV to the next shareholder value immutability to get older the bear in Spanish but the rest is ok to do the work that is not a lot to the next version with you on this one would think the first bluffs to get older the the bear with whatever is needed because this the best of my work email the information in any case the same encryption protocol is not available to you as well engagement with whatever is best of my resume.
  
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- The consumers of Canada will have a chance to review their products too to ensure they have had a perfect time for their own life and to make sure they have had a perfect time for them deal to make people feel better than they would have knocked out of the posts and they have had a perfect time for a very long run into the mix and the like for the use it as a base-line and the like for the use it is for the use it is for the use it as a base-line of a finite and I hope u stay in the past was the same password on the phone at the same password on the phone at the moment and it says it has to pay for things like your speed bump in it but it could be partially due for the use it as a base-line of a finite or the other hand that is expected to be honest and to make sure more is not the first place I want more than I see a guard to be the way to fail to see an angry dating service even though the online by the people who have worked on their craft for their whole life and thousands of dollars to get a lot of people don't struggle with basic troubleshooting and I miss the opportunity to learn about the lack of posts or effort to increase the community of people who might forget that they might still be around in the future.
  
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Honestly, I would appreciate the sentiment. Too often do I cut open the avocado and realize it's not a good one, and it ruins my lunch.

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- I'm in Germany and almost every avocado here is a bad avocado. Two things I really miss from California: avocados and dispensaries. Things I don't miss: strip malls and cars for everything.
  
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That's some great programming there.

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Avocados are great!

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- I beg to differ.
  
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I thought I was there only one spring spring showing sorting sowing great avocado blessings to everyone! (Swipe typos left in for Emojis emojis emojis emphasis)

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I am not sure if you have any questions or concerns please visit the plug-in settings for this calendar at any time you are not the intended recipient you are not the intended recipient you are not the usual and customary to the same Day service and the other day and I will be in the future of our games are based on the phone with me and I will be in the future of our games are based on the phone with me and I will be in the future of our games are based on the phone with me and I will be in the future of our games are based

0

Yes my Gboard swipe is definitely worse than before. It won't remember custom words anymore, sometimes decides to not recognize my swipe and just adds the first letter, and gives wrong suggestions more and more, even when I know my swipe pattern is correct.

Swipe was by far the best. Why did they discontinue development? To much competition?

29

Swipe was bought by Microsoft years ago, and who knows why they do what they do. The only update I've seen in recent memory for it was them adding Bing to the top row.

4

Along with search and many other things. Probably most of theur devs are optimizing user distraction and ad click rate, instead of... basic functionality 😐

25

Definitely been noticing that. I thought it was only me...

19

For some reason, half the time I try to swipe "because" it comes out as "beefsteak". No idea why and it's really annoying but I can't remove beefsteak from my swiftkey dictionary because I love tomatoes.

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Glad it's not just me thinking that.

17

Now that you mention it, yes. I used to be able to just swipe without any problems, but now I only type letter-by-letter when I'm texting someone from work.

Why, you may ask? My phone has this odd tendency to try and insult my boss/coworkers when I swipe text. I don't insult people in other places, but my phone seems very eagar to literally call them things like "wimp", "loser", "hoe", etc. I don't want to get written up, so every letter is now typed individually. I've had way too many close calls lmao

13

Not sure about that but in my native language the words for "if" and "poop" are spelled the same, so every time I type "ако" I get the 💩 as a suggestion.

It probably doesn't contribute much to the discussion but I felt compelled to share.

Edit: also "правя" which translates as making/doing (i.e making dinner, doing everything possible" automatically suggests "sex" and "blowjobs" despite me never sexting...

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Are they also pronounced the same‽

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- No, "if" is stressed on the last syllable while "💩" on the first.
  
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Absolutely. In the past few years Gboard seems to prioritize more generic words rather than the ones I'm typing. Not sure why. I still miss the Swype keyboard.

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Every damn time I type “for”, it auto corrects to “fir”. I’m about to blow a gasket.

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I don't know about you but I regulary text my friend to ask how their fur trees are doing.

3

On a similar note.. I haven't been able to find an open source keyboard for Android that has swiping. Anyone know of one maybe?

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FlorisBoard has swipe support, but it's still a new feature and doesn't work all that well. It also doesn't have the suggestion bar yet iirc.

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- It does feel pleasant and it gets words mostly right, but I can't seem to get it to work in my local language...
  
  Hoping they keep developing this one cause it feels smooth but it definitely needs more work
  
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I use the fork of OpenBoard that has swiping which is pretty good. https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard

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- Works great, I think I'll use this one then, thanks!
  
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- This is great! By far the best for swipe type.
  
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AnysoftKeyBoard also have it, but you need to activate it

2

YES. It's so frustrating now. And Gboard suddenly keeps trying to turn every word I type that starts with a "p" into "poo apper". Wtf.

10

I just want my phone to stop changing its to fucking it's. Goddammit, stop fucking changing a valid word to something else.

9

I've been noticing it for years. Back when I first started using Swype and then Swiftkey you could vaguely swipe the word somewhere close on the keyboard and it would be correct, then I had to keep resetting the predictions every few months when they got bad. Eventually that stopped working and would make weird suggestions even when super careful. I switched to GBoard which was a bit better but the predictions seem to be getting worse there as well.

9

Yes 100% no matter the keyboard I use swype typing (and heck even regular typing) ha sntoigsbly gotten worse as the years/time goes by and I don't get it. You'd think they'd get better.

This is on iOS and Android. (iOS swype by far is dog shit, the worst of the bunch)

1

I disabled autocomplete on my iphone a long time ago because it kept replacing valid words with their opposites

Example will to won’t or love to hate. Seriously.

8

Yes, Swiftkey became total garbage so I went for something completely different with https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key and like it so far. Takes some time getting used to but it's a neat way for input.

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Huh, it's the same author as lemmy.

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Interesting... I just installed this, will update later. I just switched back to using qwerty on my phone so l coud type on other peoples phones but I definitely see the appeal of using this

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I went for something even more completely different. I use pentikeyboard. It's a chorded keyboard where you use all five fingers. Takes quite a while to get used to as well.

You can't really use it one-handed, but for some reason it just feels so satisfying to use for me

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- Oh that looks delightfully eccentric, I'll check it out for sure!
  
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Nah, I'm using AnySoftKeyboard and have had no problems.

However, it wouldn't surprise me if other keyboards are implementing AI autocorrection... causing you guys issues.

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ladies and gentlemen, behold the new ai revolution!

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Yes, it was unusable on my work tablet this week. Just making up weird ass words that make no sense. Division kept becoming driven like 20 times

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Actually, yes. I uninstalled Gboard and went back to Samsung's keyboard but it doesn't help much

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It was better when I turned it off :)

4

I had thought it was because I got a new phone or because I reset the dictionary... but not having an option to stop the damned thing from correcting NUMBER INPUTS is absolutely infuriating. When typing in various lengths of lumber needed, I do not need a 60 to suddenly become a 50 without me noticing.

Aside from that, sweaty leg typing has made an absolute mess of my dictionary and there's no function to edit "added words". So I'm not sure if the auto correct has gotten worse on its own, or if it's just a symptom of user error on my part.

4

For iPhone I always feel like autocorrect was better 5-10 years ago but maybe just a selective memory (the past is rosy). Seems like in my memory you could just type without looking at the keyboard and it would all be fine. Sometimes nowadays it tries ti correct based on context or grammar but sometimes it makes no sense and you have to force it to say what you mean. I clearly typed fucking, hitting the wayyy right side of the f away from the d as possible but how many times will apple correct to ducking…several. Several times.

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I'm still using swype, so I haven't seen a lot of it since I only use gboard when I have no other choice. But, yeah, they're using humans to train their ai. By humans, I mean the people using the keyboard.

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I wish there was a phone keyboard with the backspace key is higher up. Ive been using touchscreen keyboards for over 15 years and still cannot convince my thumbs thats theres no bezel at the bottom.

I wish i could customize a keyboard for how my thumbs want to type. Itd look weird, but qwerty is weird in todays age anyway.

Even if the numbers could be on the bottom row below the spacebar, that would be a game changer.

3

You on Android?

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- I am.
  
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People use autocorrect?

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I use swipe typing, so yes.

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The Android keyboard changed a few years ago - it used to leave your word alone when you pressed space; now it will change your word to whatever the "AI" thinks.

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I cant stand that shit and fix my typos the old way.

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- I just hate that it automatically changes a word to something it thinks I wanted to type instead of just suggesting a spelling
  
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I have minor coordination issues and can't type accurately on a keyboard as small as my phone. If I manually corrected every typo it'd take me 3 times as long to type anything. I miss the suggested words with my thumb half the time. I find it easier to just slam out a word looking vaguely similar to what I was trying to type and let my phone figure it out.

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- I wish they would bring back flip phones that had physical keyboards. Touch screens are fucking garbage and always will be along with the fuck bags that thought making all phones with touch screens was a high IQ play.
  
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No change here, but I’m using an iPhone.

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On iOS? Yes, it's gotten to the point it's almost unusable. Supposedly, iOS 17 is going to address this but I've not tried the beta to confirm.

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I literally was just going to post on this. I use the Google keyboard, and not only does it just refuse to Swype some words, but sometimes it shows exactly what I'm trying to type in the preview and then just enters some completely different word when I lift my finger.

The general shittyness is one thing, annoying but I'm used to it. When I swipe in some sort of complicated word three times, with the preview saying the word I'm going for the last half of the word, and then some other random word comes out each time? I want to throw my phone. Especially when that word isn't even a suggestion anymore when I hit backspace

2

I just sent a friend this very question. Tusks for the good suggestions! Moved to Open board + swipe and it sends great.

2

I've been using Swype & Dragon since 2011 and it's been consistently great, even though unfortunately officially discontinued.

1

the machine is creaking

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