[celeritascelery]

I have had this conversation with several people. I feel like I used to be able to type with a fairly low error rate on a smaller screen with old iPhones. Now I feel that it is constant exercise in frustration as I will hit a letter and the keyboard will decide to pick the letter next to it. It is evolving backwards.

[jorvi]

There are two very simple causes to point to why touch keyboards turned to shit:

1. Crowdsourced word weighting: your keyboard's stochastic predictions are no longer mostly based on your typing, but rather on what 'everyone' is typing as their next word. This makes the word replacements it does often suboptimal to downright nonsensical.

2. Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back, because autocorrect suddenly decided that the probability is high you meant to say something else there (which it clearly isn't, as your eyes and brain exist)

The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".

Going back to the old style of doing keyboards (mostly user-learned dictionaries and probability weighting, and little lookbehind autocorrrect) could be done, but within Google and Apple there are probably people who got promoted by switching to the current shitty system. They'll block off any attempt at someone messing with their pride.

(There is a third 'problem' where your visual keys do not correspond to the touchmap at all. Swiftkey has a feature where it can show you what your touchmap and heatmap look like versus the actual layout and it its often staggeringly different, with many keys vastly tilted. When you try to desperately type "h" after 4 misses, you're doing that with your index finger in "hunt and peck" mode, which does correspond to the visual layout but not with your usual typing on the touchmap layout. There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode.)

[danudey]

> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1. Basically your keyboard thinks due to the way most people construct a particular sentence, you're gonna want to type "bold" next, despite "hold" clearly clearly making more sense. So it'll force "b" on you 4 times in a row until it realizes you really want to type "h".

In the video, the user is typing 'Thumbs up', and when they get to the first 'u' the keyboard shows a 'u' being pressed but a 'j' is inserted instead. Are you suggesting that, due to the way most people construct sentences, the OS thinks that 'thjmbs' is the most likely word? And then the next time the OS thinks that 'thhmbs' is the most likely word?

Both of the issues you've mentioned are common, and irritating, but if you watch the video you can see that that's not what's happening here. Before any autocorrection or adjustment is being done, the keyboard is registering a 'U' and the OS is inputting a J or H or I or some other nearby letter.

The video also debunks the touchmap discontinuity issues as well, because you can clearly see which key the keyboard is registering; it's not assuming that you meant to press J or it would highlight the J; it's registering a U, highlighting U, and inputting J.

It sounds to me as though you didn't watch the video and just assumed what issue was being discussed; please do watch it, because this is another, relatively new, issue that lots of people have seen and which is far worse and more frustrating than the other legitimate issues you mentioned.

[takinola]

> Aggressive lookbehind correction: these days you have to be seriously on your guard for your keyboard to not sneak-edit something you typed 5 words back

If I ever meet the person that invented lookbehind correction, I’m not sure I’ll be able to restrain myself. This person has robbed me of my peace of mind as I now have to be on guard every time I type anything on a mobile keyboard

[nneonneo]

3. I stopped caring and learned to love the algorithm in 95% of normal typing. The result is that my typing speed is up but my accuracy has plummeted, yet my typing output is generally correct because of autocorrect.

Unfortunately this falls apart when I try to type anything that isn’t common English words: names, code, rare words, etc.

I also think that the keyboard could learn the different “rhythms” of typing - my normal typing which is fast and practically blind, and the careful hunt and peck which is much slower and intended for those out-of-distribution inputs. I bet the profile of the touch contacts (e.g. contact area and shape of the touches) for those two modes looks different too.

[teaearlgraycold]

Sometimes I think about how much harm has been done to the world just so a few people can get a vacation home on Lake Tahoe. Every increase in YouTube ads leading to millions of hours wasted - but hey that L7 got a sweet new lake house!

[eviks]

> There is no way for your keyboard to know you're in "hunt and peck" accuracy mode

But there is a way for your keyboard to simply show the real size/position of buttons so that in hunt and peck mode you'll be correct

[Mattified]

This! I switched to SwiftKey some 8 years ago and no matter how many phones I change, logging into my SwiftKey account ensures my typing experience doesn't change almost at all.

[HumblyTossed]

I feel like when they introduced the neurological engine, they got away from the previous algorithm and it's just gone to shit since then. Apple being Apple, they John Force their way to victory by keeping their foot on the gas even when the wheels are spinning and the engine is smoking.

[anyfoo]

> The problem your encountering is downstream from point 1.

*you're

[neogodless]

I feel this way with Android's keyboards, too.

I still feel the pinnacle was ~2011 Windows Phone. It was some kind of swipe-to-type, but maybe not Swype specifically? At any rate, it seemed to use "how humans actually talk" as a guideline, because it was do a great job of predicting what words I would actually mean to use in a row.

Modern keyboards are like, I know you just said "I want" but instead of predicting "to" I predict "rip". I mean the letters are close. And "I want rip" makes way more sense than "I want to." You're welcome!

[dweekly]

The absolute zenith of mobile keyboards was the Blackberry, which included F & J nubs. I could type without looking at my phone at full speed and not get a character wrong.

The fact that Apple will as often as not autocorrect grammar from actually-correct to wrong -- and systematically screw up spelling -- in not just transcribed Siri but also in typing is just inexcusable at this point. It will even Randomly capitalize Certain words!

[xboxnolifes]

I swear the android autocorrect got so much worse at some point. Somewhere between 5 and 15 years ago. I used to be able to type vaguely coherent sentences and all of the typos would magically become the words I meant, even if they didn't look right. Now I frequently type completely correct sentences and the correctly spelled words get changed into other words that make no sense in context.

And i used to be able to backspace the wrong word and fix it and it would learn thats what I meant. Now if I try that, it'll frequently keep trying to edit to the word I didn't mean unless I press the little checkmark in the autocorrect panel. Just annoying UX.

[noisem4ker]

Google's Gboard completes "i want t" with "to" and "the" for me.

[The_President]

The keyboard I know is best, is the slide out hardware keyboard from the olden days. I pine for the days of old when me greasy fingers could write a book on a phone in a rainstorm.

Troll answer: A-Z label maker keyboard

[soco]

Okay but are there any other Android keyboards to swipe better? And for even nicer, to _actually handle_ multilingual input? I'm fed up of garbage concepts where you can only have ALL languages at once (who the heck wants that), or suggesting random words (I don't even know from where) and definitely unable to learn anything - not even my own name...

[voidUpdate]

My phone constantly autocorrects "the" to "Tue" (short for tuesday), even when that makes no sense in the sentence. I presume I'm accidentally typing "tue" but why it always corrects it that was is baffling

[yonaguska]

Android got really annoying recently, I think in the past few months, almost 30 percent of the time some random menu will pop up. They added a new top layer menu and I keep fat fingering it.

[WorldMaker]

Microsoft acquihired SwiftKey to help make that pinnacle Windows Phone keyboard. It's too bad SwiftKey itself became mostly a vector for ads for Microsoft.

[ricardobeat]

Not long ago I turned on my original iPod touch (2007), to see how the keyboard felt and if I was romanticising the past, and guess what?

Absolute perfect typing experience, better responsiveness and almost entirely free of mistakes. It's mind-boggling.

[xangel]

This!

[layer8]

It wouldn’t be so bad if suggested corrections would take into account sibling-letter-on-keyboard typos, and if the spellchecker would recognize when words don’t make sense in context. We had better spellcheckers 25 years ago in word processors.

[soco]

Now we must have AI everywhere, damn that quality of life those lefties keep on expecting.

[jmkni]

I guess as iPhones have gotten bigger Apple has put less resources into optimising newer iOS versions for smaller phones

Frustrating if you are a 13 mini user

[eptcyka]

Even the larger ones suck for typing. It is the keyboard. It works a lot better if you are using a language they don’t have autocorrect for.

[loloquwowndueo]

Dunno man, I’m on a 17 and there are a ton of context menus that were clearly not tested properly on a screen this size (6.1” or something) - the “delete” option is nowhere to be seen for example, you have to scroll down to find it.

Guess they’ll want us to carry iPads in our pockets for these UIs to actually work :)

[colechristensen]

Here's what happens:

* I type a word, it shows up correctly

* I type a second word, my phone CHANGES THE PREVIOUS WORD

* A silent tiny rage removes several seconds from my life

One can find many iPhone sourced typos in my HN history which I leave, usually, as a method to preserve sanity.

[wkjagt]

A decade ago this would have been a bug. Today it's a "feature".

[citrin_ru]

iPhone SE user here - it feels that even if Apple is not making small screen experience intentionally worse at least they optimize iOS for large screen sizes as a result with most updates UX on SE becoming worse. Using keyboard on this phone is a frustration but guess it's generally hard to make it work well on a small screen (and given that Apple wants to sell large phones unlikely they invest into small screen optimizations).

[alwa]

Except that it always used to work well on the SE / 13 mini form factor. That was part of the original iPhone-vs-BlackBerry magic, wasn’t it? It’s phenomenally hard to make typing work on a soft keyboard, especially at that size, and yet they did. And now un-did.

By contrast, the typing experience on a 2.5” Unihertz Atom screen is shockingly acceptable…

[reactordev]

confirmed, their glass ux has added padding to everything, reducing screen real estate.

[n8cpdx]

I moved from 13 mini this year to 16 Pro, the keyboard is just as bad either way, not a noticeable difference. Maybe slightly worse on the 16 because the ergonomics are so bad.

[nottorp]

> with old iPhones

My first iPhone was a 4S and i was astonished how correctly i'm typing. At least in English.

I even managed to bully the spell checker into reasonably accepting both English and Romanian, back when they didn't have multiple languages at the same time on the keyboard.

I'm not sure when it started to go downhill, but I was using an XS and it was at at least one more version after whatever XS shipped with.

[fuckinpuppers]

SAME. There’s weird glitches that happen way too often. Used to feel like magic.