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.
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.
That’s you assuming they show you what YOU want and not what THEY want you to see.
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
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.
There’s a firefox plugin to remove shorts from youtube entirely. super worth it.
My controversial opinion is that cell phone layout designs (not tech) peaked around 2010 and were killed by the iPhone. Don’t @ me.
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.
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.)
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.
At least a couple years ago I’d say, and it affects voice to text recognition as well.
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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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
Along with search and many other things. Probably most of theur devs are optimizing user distraction and ad click rate, instead of… basic functionality 😐
Definitely been noticing that. I thought it was only me…
Glad it’s not just me thinking that.
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.
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?
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.
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
I use the fork of OpenBoard that has swiping which is pretty good. https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard
This is great! By far the best for swipe type.
Works great, I think I’ll use this one then, thanks!
AnysoftKeyBoard also have it, but you need to activate it
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
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.
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…
Are they also pronounced the same‽
No, “if” is stressed on the last syllable while “💩” on the first.
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.
It still works actually.
Every damn time I type “for”, it auto corrects to “fir”. I’m about to blow a gasket.
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.
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)
I just want my phone to stop changing its to fucking it’s. Goddammit, stop fucking changing a valid word to something else.
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.
