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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

#101

Post by kahnclusions »

blindriver wrote: post #17

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. 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.

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

#102

Post by fragmede »

dkga wrote: post #53

Beyond fixing iPhone’s autocorrect as widely mentioned below, I wonder if in future versions Apple will end up switching to phi-1.5 or other models that are much smaller but trained on higher quality data. Would also be cool if they trained their own copilot for Xcode, given their obviously enturmes code base in Swift and Obj-C.

What's "high quality" refer to here? The amount of txt spk I use on my iphone keyboard, vs words that are in the dictionary, is heavily skewed in the direction of short words that a corpus consisting of English text is likely to omit.

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

#103

Post by brrwind »

texuf wrote: post #67
jonplackett wrote: post #64

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.

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.

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

#104

Post by Zinu »

The example at the end made me wonder if Apple's model is actually better than GPT2 for text prediction. It generated garbage, but all that garbage made somewhat sense in the context of only the word "Today".

Whereas GPT2 hallucinated random stuff about the US government. A text prediction model should predict what the user wanted to type, so if you evaluate the models based on that, GPT2 actually performed horribly, since the user showed zero intent in talking about the US.

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

#105

Post by Toutouxc »

Roark66 wrote: post #87
Toutouxc wrote: post #21

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.

What language is it?

In my case it’s Czech, but it’s the same for many others, even much more common.

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

#106

Post by Toutouxc »

Krasnol wrote: post #49
Toutouxc wrote: post #21

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.

Well, maybe you're not the target group for this product and company and should buy one from the competition? Also tell it to your friends. I don't think companies like Apple listen to anything but the numbers.

I’m an adult and I bought an iPhone knowing there are pros and cons. Some cons are more absurd than others and this is one of them. Otherwise I’m very happy with my Mini.

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

#107

Post by nprateem »

cmehdy wrote: post #32
blindriver wrote: post #17

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…

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…

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

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

#108

Post by layer8 »

petesergeant wrote: post #97
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they do that across conversations, eg if I misspell something while texting you does it recommend my misspelling when you’re talking to other people?

Yes. Ever since I went to the Maldives it wants to capitalize "male" and I have to work quite hard to get it to not correct "Yes" to "Yea", and "Thailand" to "Thailnd". Hate it.

In Settings there is Reset Keyboard Dictionary to revert to the default dictionary.

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

#109

Post by jamiedumont »

messe wrote: post #59
jamiedumont wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #99
flakiness wrote: post #2

For text input support, being boring feels like a feature not a bug. For writing on mobile, you'll be writing a lot of boring short messages. That's said, it'd be cool if it can precondition with the app name - You'll probably write something more interesting on Pages vs on iMessage.

[deleted]

[deleted]
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