It's powered by the same thing. They even mention "Even more accurate autocorrect" in iOS 17 on the product page.

Same with voice to text translation. It's absolutely, utterly, worthless. I end up having to go and edit half the message. Apple can't even get basic things right

I broke my right (dominant) collarbone on Wednesday so I’ve entered the realm of the temporarily disabled user.

So far I prefer iOS because the predictive text above the keyboard (in iOS 16 too) and in particular the speech to text feature has been so good!

The only egregious error that I have encountered has been confusion around the phrase “into” when I mean “in two”. An understandable mistake.

Out of curiosity, what accent do you have? In my experience that can have a significant impact on how good speed to text works for you.

Fairly neutral British. Born and raised in Guernsey so have a complete absence of regional accent without the very forced enunciation that comes from elocution lessons / Queens English. Admittedly I probably represent the best-case subject.

> Admittedly I probably represent the best-case subject.

I don't think you could do any better unless you were from Cupertino. With an Irish accent, my experience has been... okay with Apples text to speech, it's certainly better than others, but I still have to make a conscious effort to enunciate quite differently to my normal speech.

OpenAI's whisper has really impressed me though, and transcribes almost everything perfectly, even if I throw in phrases or words from other languages part way through the conversation.

With ios 17 it also greatly improved (at least the input, mechanism itself).

I use voice to text all the time on my iPhone and find it to be astonishingly good. I’m a 50 year old man who grew up in Southwestern Ontario so that gives you an idea of my accent.

I regularly use 4 languages on my iPhone and my autocorrect is completed broken. I can’t be bothered switching between keyboards, so the English keyboard has just completely lost the plot…

Yup same, that's why I am sticking with Android as well. I want multi-language auto-correct for my preferred languages _on the English QWERTY keyboard_.

I want the opposite! I know which language I’m typing but my phone still randomly decides I’ve written thé (French for tea) instead of the.

Word (or multi-word) prediction is a great starting place for an autocorrect model. If the keyboard I'm using knows the probability of all the possible next tokens I could type, then you can start making the tap targets for those keys bigger. And since the model is super cheap to run, you can replay the last n keyboard taps to simulate a different correction being made. That's at least how I'd make autocorrect better if I worked on the keyboard team.

Anecdotally, I've heard autocorrect is much better on iOS 17. But I won't update until the general release next week.

> then you can start making the tap targets for those keys bigger

That’s how autocorrect has worked since day one, it was just using a simpler heuristic-based prediction rather than a machine learning model.

That's how it should be, but as others have implied and I claim outirght: the heuristic-based prediction has been broken for years.

The solution badly needed isn't a complicated black box model when we know a simple one is good enough.

Maybe it’s better and I just need to keep typing so it can figure out what I mean.

In the last couple of weeks using the beta I’ve found myself fighting it more than ever. After years of typing by tapping at the screen, I’ve switched to swiping the words in because it seems to be more reliable.

I've had a similar experience with autocorrect on Android across multiple phones (lg, samsung) and keyboards (gboard, swiftkey) around the same time, I'm curious to know whether it's just my own bias being validated or something happened. All predictions have become completely stupid (switching languages mid sentence when they were robust in the past, finding least consistent suggestion first, suggesting very random terms I've never seen like "Gaylene" when I swiped to write "happened", etc).

Typing on Android was perfect when Swype was still around. GBoard and SwiftKey were worse and seem to actually decline in accuracy till this day.

Swype was the best. Google should buy it and release it as the new version of Gboard

Swype was acquired by Nuance which was acquired by Microsoft. Its competitor, SwiftKey, was also acquired by Microsoft.

I reset my gboard training data every 6-12 months since if I don't it seems to steadily get worse.

Same. I suspect everyone switched algorithms at some point because it was "state of the art", but actually a step backwards in reality.

Maybe they were optimizing battery or some other metric that wasn't necessarily prediction performance.

I can vouch for this from personal experience. Back when I had my Nexus 4, the built-in keyboard surpassed the current Gboard by a long shot. I'm not sure what happened along the way, but the spell-checking capabilities of the completely offline and lightweight keyboard that Google shipped back in those days were miles ahead.

Same here. I get all sorts of nonsensical suggestions when swiping now that I never used to get. It changed a few years pre-covid, so yeah, 5-6 years ago. I assumed it was stunting to do with a list lawsuit against samsung or something

How about just fixing the damn spellchecker on iOS?

I can never press on underlined words that are the last word before a linebreak while typing.

It’s been broken for years. YEARS!

> Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then

That was when they first changed to a machine learning-based model. I’m hoping this one is better.

Look at the positive side, it made you type less on your phone (strangely enough, I had to fight with my SE’s autocorrect three times in order to input “positive”)

Totally agree.

And I’d like to add that the editing experience is also dire and getting worse.

Just trying to put the cursor where I want it to fix an error earlier in the sentence in ios17 is a massive pain in the ass.

You tap somewhere and it continually selects entire words - I just want to put the cursor there dammit!

Press and hold the space bar to place the cursor exactly where you want it. It took me way too long to learn this.

Thank you for mentioning this! I thought Apple had eliminated this editing mode when they got rid of Force Touch. So happy to learn that it’s still available but a little frustrated I’m only learning this now.

If you hold down ‘space’ the cursor becomes Freeform. Works much better.

Yeah I noticed this starting a year or two ago, it drives me crazy

Also, getting the copy/paste menu to show takes a very long time

Yeah there’s just so much delay. Editing/writing text is just plain tedious.

Agreed!

For me stock autocorrect was always pretty much unusable, but I have no real complaints about the app I use. I'm bilingual and I type in both languages a lot. I remember when I got my first smartphone I bought SwiftKey app (later bought by Microsoft) that made language switching very easy by just swiping the space. Later the app got so good I just left it on default setting and it would still recommend the right words. Since I bought the app it has been always one if first things I installed on a new android phone (I think I had it on an iPhone 3g back in the day too, but I can't remember for sure).

I recently realised how much of a difference it makes when you type quickly as I got an extra work phone with stock android I have to use occasionally.

There is also a feature of this app I use only occasionally, but when I do its great. It let's you type by moving your finger between letters in one continously motion. When one describes it seems rather weird, but it's really one of the best features of the app. You can write really fast this way, the only difficulty it has is with very uncommon words.

> It let's you type by moving your finger between letters in one continously motion.

FYI, this has been included in stock iOS keyboard for a while now.

And also stock Android.

I also use SwiftKey and can highly recommend. I use Polish and English, sometimes within the same message and native keyboard was an absolute shitshow for me. It would literally never correct properly, sometimes make up non existing words etc. My only pain point with SwiftKey is that since last update it crashes often, I hope they might actually fix it someday. Board on iOS was forgotten long time ago so that's a no go...

Pretty sure my typing on T9 was faster and more accurate that the current state of keyboards.

This made me realize I was conflating these in my head, and I wholeheartedly agree. I had a 12 Pro Max 256GB until last year, and autocorrect was great/fine/never noticed issues. Fed up with heavy phones, I purchased a 14 Plus 512GB (very similar physical size) and set it up from scratch while migrating whatever is included in iCloud (Photos, iMessage etc). Autocorrect has been bad from the start on the 14 Plus, and has improved little in nearly a year. Typing feels tedious now, where it felt like a strength previously. The phone as been a joy to use otherwise.

You could get a phone with a physical keyboard so you would barely need auto-correct in the first place :p

Source: I have one :p

IMHO people don’t often enough think through what the Google search type-ahead would be if it had 100s of millis per BPE token and a demanding cost structure.

No one credible, least of all a guy like me who had been an enthusiastic amateur for a few years, is saying the stuff hadn’t gotten pretty wild recently.

But unprecedented? Nah.

Totally agree. I love my iPhone but autocorrect is absolutely the most painful and most infuriating part of the experience. I am constantly fighting with the autocorrect… sometimes repeating the same word 3 times because I’ve typed it correctly but iPhone really wants to change it.

Same with proper nouns. If I deliberately start a word with a capital letter it’s probably a proper noun and I know how it’s spelled, don’t correct me.

Fix this shit, Apple, it’s the one part of iPhone I really hate.

Seconding that autocorrect is inexcusably bad on iPhone.

I don’t understand why people still put up with Apple’s autocorrect instead of just turning it off. It’s so wrong so often as to be utterly useless.

Because it depends on the person. For me autocorrect is 99% spot on and so it’s a valid trade off for me to deal with correcting the remaining 1%. My wife on the other hand cannot live with it so she turned it off. And every time I type something on her phone I immediately feel slower because I know each of my key presses have to be much more deliberate.

In recent years mine has gone completely crazy and started autocorrecting to random words that don't exist. I think somehow over time it can get corrupted.

I use SwiftKey and it's much better than the Apple one. But it does require giving Microsoft access to most of what you write.

It does seem absurd that the options are "completely broken keyboard features" and "literal keylogger". Meanwhile we're paying for many transistors for NN engines and getting worse results than if they were never leveraged at all.

Is this what progress looks like?