A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

Re:A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text... by Me1000 on Sunday September 17, 2023 @01:42AM (#37541877)

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.

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Re:A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text... by deergomoo on Sunday September 17, 2023 @02:54AM (#37542221)

> 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.

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Re:A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text... by willis936 on Sunday September 17, 2023 @07:27AM (#37543868)

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.

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Re:A look at Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text... by aidos on Sunday September 17, 2023 @03:11AM (#37542327)

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.

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