Many of these look like solid feature updates, but I'm waiting to hear about a native keyboard that doesn't pick the dumbest, most context-free possible word from the smear of letters I've fat-fingered into it.
I do wonder when we're finally going to get LLM-level accuracy applied to text input (both keyboard and dictation).
Not to try to do anything predictive, but just to get words right when it would be clear to any human what the intended word would be in context, both gramatically as well as in subject matter.
I have to assume you could do this pretty well with a vastly smaller model that would run on an iPhone.
I mean, dictation on my iPhone is vastly better than it was 10 years ago -- it's usable for a lot of stuff that it simply wasn't usable for previously (dictating brainstorming ideas while lying on the couch, for example). But it still makes a lot of mistakes and just skips far too many words it can't seem to figure out.
I just wish the systems exposed the confidence of their guesses to the user. Should be a big heat map and some drop-downs to focus your review once you’re done. Instead you just see the final results of its guesses (or gaps).
Seems to be an issue across commercial dictation systems, not just iOS.
Really impacts their usage in a hands-off and eyes-off manner.
My favorite peeve is when I want to place the text caret at some point, and instead iOS refuses to do anything other than autoselect a whole word, forcing me to select somewhere far away first, then finally long press where I want.
I really fucking wish I could turn off auto selection.
I only use this damned thing because work pays for it.
Press space on the onscreen keyboard for ~2 secs and you can move the caret like a cursor. Not many people know that trick, but it totally solves what you're describing.
Which I think is utterly dumb, because the intuitive action to correct a mistake is moving the cursor to the mistake, not select a word (or a random number of words, it does that too).
The space cursor trick is an hidden feature users have no way of visually discovering unless by typing accident, or when someone tells them. It only exists because the cursor behaves unexpectedly.
This has been the bane of my existence since switching from android. Even using the google keyboard doesn't seem to help. I have no idea how the text input is so bad on iphone--maybe it's my own fault for not being familiar with the device (though i generally don't have his issue moving between pixel devices).
It's so bad I often wonder if I've done something to inadvertently screw up whatever vector database is used to weight the guesses on my particular phone. It's just hard to imagine having this bad of a user experience of a fundamental function be widespread.
That would be a huge improvement.