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Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

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Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#281

Post by projektfu »

novok wrote: post #211
snowwrestler wrote: post #39

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. 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 m…

Reminds me of how much worse siri is getting every year, where it bit flips what I say to the opposite. Makes me think they're using ML models for everything which never gets anything right with %99.9 accuracy. "Hey siri turn off the bedroom lights", "Ok, turning on the bedroom". Recently tried alexa again with an old echo dot and it worked way better with basic things like I remembered it. Super sad.

Siri has languished in nifty feature hell. Apple bought it to look futuristic but hasn't made it useful.

"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".

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#282

Post by eertami »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #240
deepGem wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.

I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well. I type a mix of Dutch and English on my phone, because that's how I talk. But there is no reliable way to say "use both". It's one or the other. 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 th…

> I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#283

Post by specialist »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #207

I use SwiftKey. I was skeptical about swipe typing at first, but it has completely won me over. I would struggle going back to regular typing now. I am often communicating in two different languages at the same time and SwiftKey can handle suggestions without breaking a sweat. Apple has come out with their own swipe keyboard and I gave it a shot, but it is nowhere near good enough. Specifically, the dual language sug…

I installed SwiftKey a few months ago. Seems nice.

Alas, as of 2022/10/05 it's no longer avail for iOS. https://9to5mac.com/2022/09/28/microsoft-swiftkey-delisted-a...

Aside, how is a virtual keyboard startup worth $250m? Acquihire? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_SwiftKey#History (I just don't understand this game.)

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#284

Post by Mordisquitos »

Y_Y wrote: post #223
travisgriggs wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gem in that tweet screed is this comment: > 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 prop…

I agree and see Thumper's Law as a combination of the Principle of Least Surprise and the concept of Loss Aversion in the sense that a pleasant surprise, like a correctly guessing what you were going to type, is greatly outweighed by the pain of an unpleasant surprise, like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.

> [...] like when the phone changes "it's" to "it's" even though I typed and wanted the former.

A beautiful live example.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#285

Post by cpdean »

i can’t for the life of me reason why the changes to auto correct were ever seen as useful. that it changes a word you’ve typed two words ago (so it’s outside of your attention by the time you’re focused on getting the most recent word correct) is baffling.

Additionally, by designing it this way you’re guaranteed to only notice when this feature fucks up. If you typed the wrong word and moved on, you never notice. If you typed the right word and moved on, you see auto correct has fucked up after you send the message, or as it’s fucking up because you’ve learned to not trust the keyboard anymore so now you’re constantly rereading the last few words as you’re typing.

Really a shame they put effort into a feature that’s designed to frustrate the user in this way.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#286

Post by [deleted] »

8ytecoder wrote: post #127
snowwrestler wrote: post #39

When the iPhone launched, Apple talked a lot about how the typing system worked. 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 m…

I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#287

Post by nawgz »

iroddis wrote: post #270
cassianoleal wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree this is infuriating. This was the reason that made me finally ditch autocorrection altogether on my iPhone. I still make mistakes but at least now they're mostly my own mistakes, and when I correct them they stay corrected.

This how I operated for a long time as well, but made liberal use of text replacement for frequent things like il -> I’ll. 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.

Why would you use autocorrect on a keyboard?

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#288

Post by specialist »

rmnclmnt wrote: post #150
8ytecoder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll just leave this here: https://twitter.com/kocienda/status/1565341723860971520

The beauty of heuristics / expert-rules based AI. Understandable, easy, fast.

Yup. Heuristics over algorithms is The Correct Answer™ (for UX).

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.

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#289

Post by cpdean »

eloisius wrote: post #167
adastra22 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can disable predictive text?!? Teach me your ways!

Settings > General > Keyboards, near the bottom there is a toggle for Predictive.

the unfortunate thing about this is you lose the three suggested words at the top of the keyboard if you want to get rid of the rewrite feature.

the suggested words are sometimes not correct, but jesus ducking christ just let me opt in if it’s useful in the moment!

Re: Ask HN: Am I getting older or did typing on the iPhone become unbearable?

#290

Post by Yizahi »

I honestly have no idea how people tolerate iOS keyboard. No numbers? No common characters? In 2022? Really?

I often contemplate switching to iPhone to get away from Google, I've previously used 3GS and 4S for multiple years. But the keyboard is definitely in the top3 negative factors keeping me from it.

PS: I can't judge modern iOS autocomplete, but on Android it's a complete garbage. Simple typos when I press a nearby key are NEVER autoreplaced. Typos like - r4ady or hscker or ma ufacture etc. It seems to me it shouldn't be to hard to make an algo looking for all valid words checking each letter for replacing it with a 6 surrounding keys on a typical US keyboard and looking them in dictionary. But nope, no luck.

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