Depends on your circle of friends I guess.
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
> I see lowercase and deliberate no punctuation 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...
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?
Users need a way to train/override the ML to “fix” mistakes.
>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.
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.
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.
My SE seems to have a bit of a psychotic breakdown over missing things. Siri, you doing ok there?
> Nature is in the way of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and
> I like the idea of the planet and the planet is in the planet of the planet and the planet
“She’s stuck in an infinite loop and he’s an idiot”
Well, that seems to be what is going on, judging from the messages I get from older and younger relatives.
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.
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.)
the suggested words are sometimes not correct, but jesus ducking christ just let me opt in if it’s useful in the moment!
Also whilst Apple is reading this, please stop changing "were" to "we're" out of context. Ugh.
Infuriating when in a rush.
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
One thing that could vastly improve the suggestions would be to only insert a proper noun if I've first tapped the shift key. Here again, Android has the infuriating habit of suddenly inserting a person, city or country name into the most prosaic of sentences.
My other major annoyance with this kind of typing on mobile is that; once the fuckwitted algorithm has made a ridiculously wrong choice, when you spot it a word or two later and go back to correct it, all the corrections offered are variations on the wrong word it chose, rather than alternatives for what could have been chosen initially.
And the very nature of typing on mobile means you're looking at the keyboard, not what's appearing on-screen [as people can do, to various degrees, on 'real' keyboards]. So, unless you're looking up at the screen between every single word, to make sure it's correct, a lot of the correcting has to be done belatedly. So the errors tend to pile up.
And usually a misplaced duck is less harmful in a polite/business setting than a misplaced fuck.
“I saw a fuck on the road on the way to work” in work chat is a different type of embarrassment than “what the duck were you thinking you ducking idiot” in a personal text.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-apple-kill-list-what-your-... might be a place to start
I took from all the comments to experiment with turning off auto-complete. So far its going great. You can still manually select words to substitute or complete but the algorithm won’t change any words by itself.
Oh.And this was with my phone set to 'UK English' and Yandex keyboard set to use 'System Language'. If I caught it in time, I could drag the suggested word off the suggestion bar, so it would be removed from future suggestions. But the yanks have mangled the English language so much, it was a Sisyphean task.
This is also consistent with my experience.
QuickType Keyboard: Multilingual Typing
English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hindi
The is one problem with letting Americans design things. They don't understand that the rest of the world regularly speaks more than one language, and that in different environments they're mixed up in different ways.
It's actually bliss to write Japanese.. even with my limited ability to do that. The only thing that pops up is suggestions for which kanji or whatever to use for what I entered. Works smoothly and fast.
Huh, really?
I have "Multilingual typing" enabled in my Android keyboard settings and it works pretty well. I can write a message that has English, German and French mixed in (not even that uncommon in Switzerland...) and it doesn't have any problems with it.
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.
> 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.”
A beautiful live example.
"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".
- 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.
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.
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).
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.
I hate when it autocorrects e-mail addresses for some reason
Meanwhile, I had to delete the omw replacement which, 100% of the time, replaced with the overly enthusiastic "On my way!".
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.
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.
Phase 1: iPhone w/o autocorrect but with text replacements.
Phase 2: iPhone and macOS, but text replacements are synched without option to disable. I don’t want autocorrect or replacements while typing on a real keyboard.
Phase 3 (reluctantly): iPhone with autocorrect, macOS without it, and no text replacements.
tl;dr it would be nice if I could disable text replacement on a per-device basis.
> Worse is its insistence on continuing to autocorrect words I’ve just gone back to fix.
>i just turned auto correct off completely a few versions ago...
We're gonna need to see some proof.
PS --you misssed "it will also chooses"
I want an option to disable that, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way other than turning off autocorrect altogether (which I've been alternating it on and off lately trying to figure out which one aggravates me least; I also briefly returned to SwiftKey [RIP] to see if its ancient less recently trained ML autocorrect model was better).
If you pause at the end of the word, either the first time or after correcting it, and don’t hit any key, it’ll throw up the “suggestion X” popup. Tapping X on that popup teaches it the word.
I, and a lot of others, will backspace to correct a word, then hit space, and then it immediately undoes the correction, because hitting the space bar is indicating “you can go ahead and autocorrect this as you would in everyday typing”.
This training method isn’t documented anywhere that I know of, has worked for years (perhaps for all time?), and is the opposite of well-known. I am really upset with Apple for that last one especially.
That said, there are times when retroactive correction is useful. If I type "new york," it's appropriate for the phone to automatically correct it to "New York" and not "new York"
they then removed this a few years ago.
utterly baffling how over-engineered and regressive it has become
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.
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!
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.
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??