Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I really can’t stand how stupid autocorrect is, surely in an age where deep learning can predict how proteins fold it can phonetically and contextually correct words?

View on HN

I keep hearing how robo taxies are a year away - meanwhile when I asked Google assistant to call my wife to avoid looking at the screen and driving it decided to call some company in Delaware (despite me living in central Europe).

Seems like there's low hanging fruit in AI applications that are still not even close to optimal.

“something went wrong”

I've just accepted that it about 70% of the time it'll switch the words "ill"/"I'll", "well"/"we'll" and "its"/"it's" to the wrong version even when I use them correctly.

I just switched it off.

It's useful enough in other cases though - it's just a bit overzealous when I am accurate. The weird thing is that there was a period where it was near-perfect, then one iOS upgrade caused a sudden decline in quality that's remained ever since

100% agree. Maybe the specific layout of a QWERTY keyboard is somehow particularly bad for this, but jabbing at the general location of the letters I want combined with a half decent AI should make text entry really damn reliable.

Even just writing that paragraph, so many autocorrect opportunities were missed, and so many were suboptimal or just plain wrong…

Blows my mind that Apple isn’t doing better at this feature at this ooont. No, I meant to type “point”!

I know right, it’s definitely not related to words you write on a regular basis…

iPhone's autocorrect at one point was rather decent because it was running from a language model. And then AFAIK they switched to a crowdsourced model which... just sucks and is never correct

That “language model” and the keyboard itself would also adapt to your own writing patterns. As you’d type, the hit areas of the letters would dynamically change to adapt based on the previously typed letters and your typing history. For example, if, when typing a word, you consistently would hit between two keys when only one made sense, it would increase the hit area of the key you meant to hit and decrease the other.

When Apple tried to use AI to make autocorrect better it got worse.

But it really ducking sucks…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com