Is the Android 13 screen keyboard a lot worse than Android 7's?
I mean the functionality where it guesses what word you are trying to type, after seeing a few letters, or when you type by sliding your finger over the keyboard instead of pecking individual keys. I have all the custom dictionary and self-training stuff shut off on my old Android 7 phone (didn't want to upload data to Google) and it still worked pretty well. Is it my imagination or is Android 13 a lot worse?
Amusingly, Android 13 seems more willing to use NSFW words. I tried to type "furosemide" (a prescription drug that a family member uses) and the phone sas "fu" and suggested "fucking". Android 7 also had those words but wouldn't use them until it was out of alternatives. I'm not offended but I think that change is funny.
Autocorrect has been getting worse and worse. It used to get it right more than not, now it's the opposite. I had to rewrite the previous sentence several times.
That’s not just android. iOS is similarly shitty. Even when you reset the dictionary of custom items as suggested it is just shit. I remember being able to type after on an iPod touch than my current iPhone XR. The edges of the screen are basically non existent as far as the touch keyboard is concerned.
I switched to Microsofts keyboard because of this.
The Google one used to be perfectly fine when you wrote multiple languages in a single sentence.
These days, even if I just write dutch, french or english (or, not and), it does absolutely idiotic autocorrects.
Don't have that issue with Microsofts keyboard.
Also, the google one has become very laggy for me in certain apps, especially on my tablet. If I try to comment on a Youtube video, it takes a good 30 seconds before I can actually type anything.
Glad it's not just me that feels this way. There are certain words that it just seems to refuse to auto-complete no matter how many times I try or how slow I go. Feels like it's biased towards commonly used words and cares less about what you're actually typing
I find that if you type out the whole word, by swiping or individual letters, no matter how inaccurate your presses or swipes are it can guess the correct word with high accuracy. If you instead type out only a little bit of the word its ability to guess is shockingly bad. So it's better to scatter gun the whole word than try and type accurately but only type the word partially, if that makes sense.
What annoys me is that I swear it didn't use to take me trying to type the whole word before it guessed the correct word. So something has changed, yes.
Swiping the whole word works in Android 13 some of the time, but ISTM it was better in Android 7. So I'm posting here basically to ask whether it's just me experiencing that.
Deleting nonsense suggestions is helpful. Or deleting actual words that you rarely use. For example, swipe often will type "slay" instead of "also", so I just delete slay from the dictionary.
What I noticed is that the predicted word it's showing you right above the keyboard doesn't match with what it's actually entering into the text box. I find myself having so many nonsensical sentences because what I thought I was typing is completely different from what it entered.
As someone who types mixed english/german I would say they're not worse, but also in a low of ways not better. They're definitely not bad though, and in fact frequently win out over SwiftKey.
One big issue with german is that GBoard struggles hard with the concept that "mal" and "rum" are not always capitalized because they get used colloquially a lot. SwiftKey learns this after days, GBoard needs you actively delete the capitalized version from the suggestions a few times.
But, importantly, this has been getting better! It used to be a lot more insistent on "fixing" this, now after a few times it accepts it and even if you write the capitalized version it no longer fully changes back.
Regardless of what you think of Microsoft, SwiftKey is far and away the best mobile keyboard for autocorrect. I try to stick with stock apps but the Google keyboard just doesn't cut it.