And yet, when the latter inevitably breaks on an edge case, users can try to fix it themselves. They don't hit a wall of frustrated "I can't do anything", they hit a challenge that they are empowered to try overcoming. They already know what they want and can set things that way, rather than trying vaguely to teach a system (machine learning, hardcoded heuristics engine, department of humans making seemingly unconnected changes to a GUI with each passing version and no obvious plan) to understand their desires.
I miss the days when users were seen as intelligent professionals who are willing to change settings, create and re-dock an assortment of toolbars to every edge of every screen/window to suit their daily tasks, read a manual (or at least search the integrated help entries) to overcome problems. Rather than "busy" phone users who just want to complete a task with minimal time spent learning and get back to posting on facebook or whatever, and who accept the automagical solution because adequate results instantly are somehow considered better than great results with some work.
Ugh, that whole block of text just kept growing; I had better leave and go ramble/rant at trees or clouds or something elsewhere.
This works fine for me with GBoard. Are you drawing a little circle on the o to indicate you want the double letter?
The weird thing is that if I type nothing at all, the contextual predicted "next word" on GBoard is actually very good -- I wasn't praising it for comedic effect. But it really does seem like there's a sign error in a sort function which kicks in after you start typing.
I've specifically googled for instructions on how I might be expected to use the swipe-style keyboards, and turned up nothing.
edit: Don't actually see a tutorial in the app. Maybe I'm confused with another app such as Swype, but the same technique seems to apply to all.
About it only replacing after you start writing, the probability of "son" must grow faster than the one of "soon" after you type "so". If there were such a huge bug, you would be seeing a new word every time, not always the same one.
I think what's happening here is that there's a very impressive and sophisticated heuristic for predicting the probability of what you want to type by looking at the frequency of what you have typed in similar contexts. It uses its state-of-the-art AI to evaluate the context and build an array of candidate words, along with their respective probabilities. I suspect it is very accurate as it does this. Then it sorts the array by probability and pops the top element into the predictive text input.
Alas -- per my pet theory anyways -- it sorts like this:
Rather than: ...which is how a two-character diff can turn a brilliantly helpful AI into an ultimately annoying damnit-I-need-to-smash-something antagonist.