this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy

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[–] [email protected] 96 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago

That's you assuming they show you what YOU want and not what THEY want you to see.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

What’s even more annoying is they’re capable of recommending interesting long videos, they purposefully recommend shorter videos on mobile (like less than a minute), on pc they recommend more long videos and the TV app seems to have the most long videos

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Something gets good, but the team needs to justify continued pay so they keep developing what doesn't need development.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

My controversial opinion is that cell phone layout designs (not tech) peaked around 2010 and were killed by the iPhone. Don't @ me.

[–] [email protected] 51 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

At least a couple years ago I'd say, and it affects voice to text recognition as well.

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[–] hellishharlot 12 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (8 children)

I texted to my husband " have a good day", and it corrected to " have a good avocado". Have a great avocado everyone!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Have an idea of what I have a great day and I will be able to see you soon answering the phone if you have to be a good time to call you can see the attached file is scanned image in PDF format the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Honestly, I would appreciate the sentiment. Too often do I cut open the avocado and realize it's not a good one, and it ruins my lunch.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes my Gboard swipe is definitely worse than before. It won't remember custom words anymore, sometimes decides to not recognize my swipe and just adds the first letter, and gives wrong suggestions more and more, even when I know my swipe pattern is correct.

Swipe was by far the best. Why did they discontinue development? To much competition?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Swipe was bought by Microsoft years ago, and who knows why they do what they do. The only update I've seen in recent memory for it was them adding Bing to the top row.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago

Along with search and many other things. Probably most of theur devs are optimizing user distraction and ad click rate, instead of... basic functionality 😐

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

Definitely been noticing that. I thought it was only me...

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

Glad it's not just me thinking that.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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...

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Every damn time I type “for”, it auto corrects to “fir”. I’m about to blow a gasket.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I use the fork of OpenBoard that has swiping which is pretty good. https://github.com/erkserkserks/openboard

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I just want my phone to stop changing its to fucking it's. Goddammit, stop fucking changing a valid word to something else.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Yes, Swiftkey became total garbage so I went for something completely different with https://github.com/dessalines/thumb-key and like it so far. Takes some time getting used to but it's a neat way for input.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Huh, it's the same author as lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Interesting... I just installed this, will update later. I just switched back to using qwerty on my phone so l coud type on other peoples phones but I definitely see the appeal of using this

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yes, it was unusable on my work tablet this week. Just making up weird ass words that make no sense. Division kept becoming driven like 20 times

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Nah, I'm using AnySoftKeyboard and have had no problems.

However, it wouldn't surprise me if other keyboards are implementing AI autocorrection... causing you guys issues.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

ladies and gentlemen, behold the new ai revolution!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Actually, yes. I uninstalled Gboard and went back to Samsung's keyboard but it doesn't help much

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'm still using swype, so I haven't seen a lot of it since I only use gboard when I have no other choice. But, yeah, they're using humans to train their ai. By humans, I mean the people using the keyboard.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

For iPhone I always feel like autocorrect was better 5-10 years ago but maybe just a selective memory (the past is rosy). Seems like in my memory you could just type without looking at the keyboard and it would all be fine. Sometimes nowadays it tries ti correct based on context or grammar but sometimes it makes no sense and you have to force it to say what you mean. I clearly typed fucking, hitting the wayyy right side of the f away from the d as possible but how many times will apple correct to ducking…several. Several times.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I had thought it was because I got a new phone or because I reset the dictionary... but not having an option to stop the damned thing from correcting NUMBER INPUTS is absolutely infuriating. When typing in various lengths of lumber needed, I do not need a 60 to suddenly become a 50 without me noticing.

Aside from that, sweaty leg typing has made an absolute mess of my dictionary and there's no function to edit "added words". So I'm not sure if the auto correct has gotten worse on its own, or if it's just a symptom of user error on my part.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It was better when I turned it off :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

I wish there was a phone keyboard with the backspace key is higher up. Ive been using touchscreen keyboards for over 15 years and still cannot convince my thumbs thats theres no bezel at the bottom.

I wish i could customize a keyboard for how my thumbs want to type. Itd look weird, but qwerty is weird in todays age anyway.

Even if the numbers could be on the bottom row below the spacebar, that would be a game changer.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

I use swipe typing, so yes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The Android keyboard changed a few years ago - it used to leave your word alone when you pressed space; now it will change your word to whatever the "AI" thinks.

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