Jelly Bean keyboard is lousy

[s44]

SmartKeyboard Pro allows you to select any word that you've typed so far and it will show the autocorrect options. Other keyboards only give you autocorrect options for the most recent word only.

Swype

 

[TuxDave]

A keyboard lives and dies by its ability to quickly correct misspellings I think.

I used to be the type of guy that didn't care about autocorrect. I figured that if I just type carefully, who cares! 3 years later? I now mash buttons as fast as I can and my phone churns out the right sentences like magic. It's definitely refreshing.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Heh, you don't even have to bother with space with Swiftkey.

 

[thecapsaicinkid]

I used to be the type of guy that didn't care about autocorrect. I figured that if I just type carefully, who cares! 3 years later? I now mash buttons as fast as I can and my phone churns out the right sentences like magic. It's definitely refreshing.

Until you wake up one morning (for me this was yesterday) and realise that you've practically made yourself illiterate and no amount of technology can interpret your furious swiping. I have found myself getting irate with the keyboard because it didn't determine the right word when on reflection, I hadn't swiped anything like the correct sequence of letters.

Just tried the new SwiftKey, while it does fix a few of the stock jellybean annoyances, it still has some real issues for me.

1. It doesn't work in address bars
2. It is really difficult to go back and correct words (the most important thing)
3. It doesn't recognise double letter scribbling
4. Swipe to delete doesn't work
5. It seems a bit laggy to me

So all in all, if you could combine Swype and SwiftKey together, throw a bunch of cuss words into the dictionary, we might be on to a winner.

 

[Red Storm]

Tried the newest SwiftKey beta, but wasn't long before I was back with the stock Keyboard.

 

[ControlD]

I used to be the type of guy that didn't care about autocorrect. I figured that if I just type carefully, who cares! 3 years later? I now mash buttons as fast as I can and my phone churns out the right sentences like magic. It's definitely refreshing.

I know you are an iPhone user (as am I) so I have to ask: did you have to train the keyboard somehow? I would guess my 4S gets corrections right about 25% of the time so I rarely count on it working. Even for simple mistakes the suggestions are almost always wrong. For example, if I type "Whot" the suggestion is "Shot", never "What", "Swollow" gets corrected to "swollen" rather than "swallow". It just seems like the keyboard never gets the right correction for me.

 

[TuxDave]

I know you are an iPhone user (as am I) so I have to ask: did you have to train the keyboard somehow? I would guess my 4S gets corrections right about 25% of the time so I rarely count on it working. Even for simple mistakes the suggestions are almost always wrong. For example, if I type "Whot" the suggestion is "Shot", never "What", "Swollow" gets corrected to "swollen" rather than "swallow". It just seems like the keyboard never gets the right correction for me.

I know there's some type of training going on but it's definitely not something that I have to do on purpose or to add any words to any dictionary. My phone is getting close to 100% right with my mashing and this includes me sending notes like "lololol", "pfffft" and random onomatopoeia words. There are some words that don't work "aiyo" which is Chinese pinyin which gets corrected to "auto". Maybe one day it'll work.

For your case, Whot is probably corrected to shot instead of what because the "o" letter is so far away from the "a" letter that it thinks that you most likely meant to hit the o and made a mistake on the w vs s. You need to at least hit the keys NEAR the ones you want. The other type of correction seems to be common misspellings but I guess it assumed that people rarely misspell what as whot. Even in firefox, what isn't in the list of suggested corrections for "whot".

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

^

Correct. It seems that relative positions is more important. If I blindly mash at the keys it usually gets my message correct. Remember typos are about hitting nearby keys or forgetting to insert spaces or inserting extra spaces.

I know you are an iPhone user (as am I) so I have to ask: did you have to train the keyboard somehow? I would guess my 4S gets corrections right about 25% of the time so I rarely count on it working. Even for simple mistakes the suggestions are almost always wrong. For example, if I type "Whot" the suggestion is "Shot", never "What", "Swollow" gets corrected to "swollen" rather than "swallow". It just seems like the keyboard never gets the right correction for me.

I'd say there's some sort of learning in the background the phone does. I think over a couple weeks I felt that either I was getting better at my iPhone 5, or it was learning.

 

[ControlD]

^ ^^

Yeah, you guys are right. I never though about the relative position thing but that makes perfect sense. I do see that "Whst" gets corrected to "What" because the "s" and the "a" are right next to each other.

I think the truth of the matter is that I just suck at typing on screens with no tactile feedback.

I wish the Droid4 was a better phone. That thing looks to be custom made for me with a real keyboard.