[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!

[wooger]

Nokia E61 perfectly aped the blackberry form factor and also had a great keyboard (with f & j nubs). I still fondly remember mine.

[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.

[yipbub]

I remember when I could blindly type because autocorrect was so good. I've been enjoying FUTO keyboard a bit, but I dont yet know if it's the same experience.

[Naracion]

Bit of an aside, but I just checked them out and TIL that Immich (which I use as my primary photos solution) is also a FUTO product (the website says "powered by FUTO").

I'd be giving the keyboard a try!

[Izkata]

SwiftKey has this one where you can erase the wrong word and try to correct it, and it instead adds two words: the one you erased and the second attempt after it.

[noisem4ker]

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

[CrimsonRain]

Which is the better option now. But the one he's talking about is the OG windows phone swipe keyboard which would predict next word almost like from a LLM these days. For that reason, you can swipe like a maniac but it'd still type the correct thing.

Apple keyboard is shit. Swype (the one Microsoft bought) is better but still shit. Gboard is ok. But none of them are close to that windows phone keyboard. I still miss it.

[homebrewer]

Google's keyboard is okay for English. It's a complete tire fire for two other languages I use (both popular and with a very large training data set).

Suggests words that make no sense, preferring rare words to much more widely used and obvious matching picks. Has the vocabulary of a poorly educated five year old idiot savant — fails to complete many words you use fifty times a day, but sometimes surprises you by suggesting something you'd hear a couple times per decade. Doesn't know other forms of the same word, forcing you to correct it manually over and over again, often failing to remember the word until you type it in four or five times.

Yes, I've downloaded all the dictionaries, tried it on many phones, and my friends are of the same opinion: it really is just bad.

[ASalazarMX]

I write in English and Spanish on it, and it seems the shittiness gets multiplied when you use a bilingual instead on monolingual layout. I've tried switching languages manually, but that sucks even more when writing Spanish with English technical terms sprinkled.

This is a patent case where IA made a function worse instead of better, yet companies clinged to it for some reason.

[devilbunny]

Never used the Windows Phone keyboard but after Swype fixed its worst error ("me" was very often rendered as "nee", as in the term for a maiden name) it was fantastic. The last time I was able to use it was ca. 2016 when my Nexus 6P suffered the dreaded battery-goes-to-worthless-one-night-and-never-recovers problem. The editing keyboard allowing precise cursor placement, the Swype-X/C/V shortcuts, Swyping above the keyboard to indicate capitalization - WHY WHY WHY were they dropped?

The swiping keyboard from Apple simply refuses to do "and" for me. I get "abs" (I'm not a gym rat; I don't talk about that) or "Abbas" (the only one I know is the Palestinian president, and I don't talk about him either) almost every time. I hate the autocorrect-something-five-words-back problem, but not being able to recognize one of the most common words in the language is unacceptable crap.

I'll give Swiftkey another try.

[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

[amluto]

My old Windows phone had a slide out keyboard that was conceptually nice but had a bizarre ortholinear layout and particularly poor switches.

[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.

[benchly]

I have the same experience, and my hands are pretty small. Some paranoid bell rang in my head about it being an intentional annoyance to start getting us to use voice-to-text more,

Even switching to the Hacker's Keyboard and tweaking some settings still has me smacking the "tab" key or whatever when hitting space.

Just out of curiosity, who here is a one-handed texter, like me? I just assumed my constant need for error correction was because I only use one hand (and thus, one thumb) to type, but this thread has me wondering.

[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.