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Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

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Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#61
post #40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#62

I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect. Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant experience and I need it to change. T…

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”)

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#63
post #26

Meanwhile my language and dozens of others with hundreds of millions of speakers still don’t get the predictions at all, don’t support multi-language typing and don’t support swipe typing. Typing on a $1000 iPhone in one of these languages is still a 2007 experience.

My biggest multilingual gripe on iOS is that highlighting text in, say, Czech and pressing Translate on the popup just tells you to fuck off. Like, sure, don't support the language, but at least give me a Google Translate link then.

Did you enable the Czech-English dictionary under Settings -> General -> Dictionary?

You can also add Czech as a language under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Add Language. This will let you switch your keyboard to Czech when typing and enable the language on websites and stuff. You can also switch the whole phone to Czech if you like, just by moving Czech to the top of the list of preferred languages.

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#64

I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect. Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant experience and I need it to change. T…

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!

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#65
post #25

I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect. Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant experience and I need it to change. T…

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

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

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#66
post #55

Meanwhile my language and dozens of others with hundreds of millions of speakers still don’t get the predictions at all, don’t support multi-language typing and don’t support swipe typing. Typing on a $1000 iPhone in one of these languages is still a 2007 experience.

Modern language processing relies on pretty large corpora, and to bootstrap it requires a part to be of high quality and annotated, although for spelling correction you don't need annotation. Or you can go the GPT-3 route and use really huge corpora. If that doesn't exist for your language, and for many smaller languages it doesn't, it won't get better than 2007.

I'm not sure about that. It doesn't require a huge corpus to learn the structural features of a language. If you have that plus an English dictionary for the language, an English language model should transfer pretty well to any language.

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#67

I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect. Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant experience and I need it to change. T…

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.

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#68

I don't want better predictive text. I need better autocorrect. Something happened about 6 years ago where the quality of the autocorrect fell off the roof, and it's been absolutely terrible since then. I spend too much of my time fighting with either mispelling, flipping to the wrong word even though I spelled the word properly, etc. It has made typing on my iPhone an unpleasant experience and I need it to change. T…

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!

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

Re: Apple’s new Transformer-powered predictive text model

#69
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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