I remember like seven years ago my android keyboard's autocorrect was completely fine? Not only would it seem to remember my common finger slip-induced typos and correct them on sight, but it could also autocorrect typos with numbers in them, ie recognizing "3" as a missed "e", etc

But nowadays my autocorrect fucking sucks rank ass? It's awful at guessing the correction for typos as it looks like (to me) it only uses the first letter as the basis for autocorrect, and if I mistyped the first letter then I'm shit out of luck for autocorrect picking up, like there's absolutely no way it could possibly guess what I mean when I say "I want vurgers for dinner"

But somehow it's gotten even WORSE than just bad at its job lately? I've had regular instances of the autocorrect changing a correctly spelled and grammatically correct word to something completely different. Just yesterday it autocorrected the word 'with' in the middle of a sentence to 'WI', as in the acronym for Wisconsin.

what is the point of making your basic functionality shittier? to sell premium keyboard apps? jesus christ

  • Foolio [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Mine inserts random words when I type a period at the end of a sentence which is very annoying.

    • laziestflagellant [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      elite gigabrained techbros: yeah machine learning and deep ai webs are going to be the future of communication

      78 shitzillion dollar AI algorithm pumped full of illegally gathered data of 500 million people: when you said " . " you meant "butter", right?

    • laziestflagellant [they/them]
      hexagon
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Mine does the exact same thing for some ungodly reason. Punishing me for ellipsis crimes... :gamer-gulag:

  • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Oh, it's not just me! And it definitely does seem to be a huge reliance on the first letter of the word. Like if I accidentally type 'rhen' it doesn't try 'then' or 'when' it goes straight to 'rhythm' or 'rhyme' or some shit. And it's constantly trying to capitalize the first letter of words in the middle of sentences for no freaking reason. I wonder if there was a patent lawsuit or a licensing expiration or something. I went from a samsung s7 to a cheapo samsung and the s7 was still working great when I switched over. Totally regret it.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Just went and checked, both phones are using Samsung Keyboard. My S7 used 3.0.24.98, the new one uses 5.4.70.16 but has an update available I'm going to try.🤞

      • laziestflagellant [they/them]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        Yes please I need to have hope there's a keyboard out there that can translate 'rhen' to 'then' because my current one sure can't either

        • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
          ·
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          So far, so good. If you're on Samsung try updating it by going into the keyboard settings and About Samsung keyboard.🤞

          Edit: I guess it doesn't update automatically because it uses the Samsung store...🤔

  • Quimby [any, any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I think this is a consequence of the companies getting high on their own supply and forgetting that machine learning is just a fancy word for statistics. And if you don't do things like clean your data, curate your model, etc, your output is going to be shit. Along those same lines, letting computers train themselves / train each other starts off well enough, but then you stop paying attention, mistakes slip in, and they get reinforced and compounded. Computers are very good at statistics, but that doesn't mean a computer can understand what a given statistic actually means. Because they aren't sentient.

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      forgetting that machine learning is just a fancy word for statistics

      Tbh another issue is the statistics part gets ditched a lot of the time. I can't tell you how many times I've had a manager tell me to dig through the data to explain a "weird" result. And the answer is always "the effect is too small to be captured with the sample we used, running a statistical test gives you a p-value of like 0.2". And my manager, who is a data scientist not accepting this. Similar thing happens when selecting models, where they'll have me select some really dopey parameters because the model "performs better", but the difference between it and the old model is less than a standard deviation away.

      Tbh not my manager's fault, he's just stressed because the expectations are ridiculous and so are the timelines.

    • UlyssesT
      ·
      edit-2
      22 days ago

      deleted by creator

  • The_Jewish_Cuban [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    The thing I hate most is when it corrects possessive "its" to the contraction "it's". Pisses me off to no end.

  • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
    ·
    2 years ago

    autocorrect is proscriptivist fascistic thought control that every leftist should eschew

    im mostly kidding but tonnes of fully grammatical words like proscriptivist get flagged because that particular permutation doesn't get used a lot? ridiculous. its intolerable to have to fight lil squiggly lines and popups everytime you use an unexpected suffix or want to change spelling for a point

    • Catherine_Steward [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      yeah i dont mind too much when its squiggly lines cause at least then the worst that happens is i google it like "that is a word right? yes of course its a word this computer just doesnt own a dictionary" but when i have to fight my phone to even let me say completely acceptable, intentional, correct words spelled correctly i do get legit frustrated

      happens with names, too. god forbid you want to discuss a chinese person

      • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i swear autocorrect (if its allowed to exist at all) needs replaced with something that just analysises roots-prefixes-suffixes, because yeah, if you fuck up letter order in 'adreno' or something that could be a problem for intelligibility but any construction made of correctly spelled word parts is going to be a word.

        no promises that word is gonna be useful or make sense but thats for the readers and writers to fight about

  • 20000bannedposters [love/loves]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Apple nukes their whole ios every few years. Android just layers on more and more shit with each up date. In all likely hood it's just a giant mess and getting worse and worse due to all the new script being shoved on top of old script. That's my guess

    Swype has gotten insanely bad.

    • Quimby [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I'm actually kind of amazed Apple has realized, correctly, that writing things from scratch (with some copy paste, of course) every few years will actually save money / make more money in the long run.

      It's very counterintuitive and a really hard sell given the short-term costs of doing so.

      • 20000bannedposters [love/loves]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        If you think about it. It forces more phone sales. They basically nuke the old phones to the point they don't really operate. Where as android you got 10 year old smartphones still going. But then you get the problem like my pixle 6 where it's clear that the ios is a giant turd that needs to be burnt down and redone.

  • shimmer [undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I have noticed this, the autocorrect definitely seems to have gotten worse.

  • bayezid [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Somehow autocorrect concluded that the definitive form of English is that of a Bosnian guy for who English is his third language.

    • Spike [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I spell things correctly and it will change the word anyway. Eg "if" to "of", "then" to "They". Just constantly making me look like I have no idea how to type anything

  • THC
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

      • laziestflagellant [they/them]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        love 2 look up questions about video game mechanics and get an entire page of algorithmically written guides with incorrect information when I just want to know where the fuck a certain fish spawns or whatever

        • ssjmarx [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The golden age of game guides was GameFAQs. Just give me a big ctrl+f-able text document, PLEASE!

      • star_wraith [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I think Google hasn't figured out how to defeat search engine optimization. They may not even care to. But people have figured out ways to game the system. IIRC that's the reason people write out long ass journal entries before just giving you the recipe - it's all meant to max out SEO points.

      • Quimby [any, any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        shit. it's on the tip of my tongue, but there was this really good example recently where google took two unrelated articles and ended up with something like "Michael Jordan is the President of Israel" or something like that.