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Comment by nerdjon | Hacker News Reader

I always found the criticisms about Apple's autocorrect to be severely overblown. Considering pieces of that were necessary for a virtual keyboard the size of the original iPhone to even be viable in the first place.

Yeah it did some annoying things like correct fuck to duck... but to call it non functioning is just flat out wrong. More often than it it did what I needed it to do.

Also "friendly reminder" maybe we should ask ourselves why a certain Ad company has so much data to improve their AI at faster paces, and it isn't because they have better engineers.

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I couldn't disagree more. The number of times it corrects not the word I just typed, but instead words prior to the word I typed.. head explodes.. I've reached the point where I have to proof read texts after they've been written in their entirety because Apple seems to play swap-a-roo at will. I just don't get it. If I hit the spacebar and moved on to the next word then that's the sole word I want autocorrect to be worrying about.

I’ve been using iOS since 2007 (first iPod touch), in three different languages, and have never had anything similar. Do you have an example of words it autocorrects wrongly for you?

This is the NEW iOS. Before updating to iOS 17, this did not happen to me. With the new 'transformer' autocorrect, it does. Supposedly it is context aware and that is why it is correcting past words as you keep typing.

I guess Apple needs a bit more than attention to have a good autocorrect model.

It was already swap-a-roo’ing since iOS 16, maybe even 15.

It also somehow misses simple corrections. Try it right now, it doesn’t know that “ennencuiate” should correct to “enunciate”. Or even “dejline” to “decline”.

What’s worst about the swap—a-roo’ing is that it will replace a common logical word in a sentence with something seldom-used.

Like, it’d correct “overwhelmingly just not how it works” to “ontologically just not how it works”.

I know it's well intentioned, but in 90% of cases it's just wrong and destructive. I'll correct the word I just typed because I anticipate it being potentially wrong. But somebody changing something from 3 words ago? What the hell?

I can't even turn it off because I use the swipe input.

It's so funny that it'll use new, wrongly guessed information to change previous context rather than using that context to correctly guess the new information.

That being said, I think they toned it down in one of the recent updates. I remember being infuriated much less by it than a year ago.

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