Comment by Someone1234
3 hours ago
I've been using it for several months since the developer beta came out; overall I'm extremely positive on it. One of their better releases that seemingly focused more on quality and refinements than new-features.
Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
The keyboard remains unfixed, as is tradition. The same issues they've "fixed" like three or four releases now, seemingly are identically broken, and I'm lost faith they CAN fix it.
The iOS Keyboard and Search on Windows, are like the perpetually broken things that both companies have "fixed" every year for the last ten+ years and yet... It is almost farcical as this point.
Apple's search is so comically bad. For example, I can click on my applications, and I have an app called Chess. I can often type letters C-H-E-S-S and have it not show the Chess app. This is inside the applications folder!
Many people have complained before. Honestly I ONLY search for app names in spotlight search or application window, it should be trivial to make it actually work. Maybe i just need to vibecode some alternative search bar :(
It’s so much worse than that. This happens to me on a daily basis with both MacOS and iOS. Say I’m searching for Chess, I’ll get to the C-H and it’ll show the Chess app, but enter that next -E and it’s totally gone. It feels like the system is designed like “Well, I showed them Chess when they entered CH, but they kept typing, so they must not actually want Chess.” This ends up breaking for me like 95% of the time, and the only way around it is to search like “C”…wait for results…”H”…wait for results…etc. It’s maddening.
A common one I hit is "blu" showing bluetooth settings, but "blue" does not. Very frustrating to see the thing you are hoping for popup, but then go away as you type more if its name.
Windows does this, too. So I really wonder how come two companies implemented the same borked behavior.
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Any improvements to voice to text? I use iPhone 13 Mini and so keyboard has always been hard to type on. But voice to text..man..it is an absolutly miserable experience that I wish I could swap out for any other competitor.
I normally don't complain that iOS/MacOS isn't customizable because the defaults are good enough to work for me but that voice to text man its like they completely forgot about it.
There is also a new, larger voice to text model available... but not for an old iPhone like the 13 mini. Only like the iPhone 17 Pro and above.
The best workaround is a third party app that lets you run Parakeet V3 or Whisper on your phone. There are quite a few.
Dictus is one that I’ve been playing around with.
It’s by far the best speech to text I’ve ever used so I’m a fan
Hear hear. The insistence upon prioritizing names in my extensive contacts list as well as certain geographic names leads to so many unnecessary manual edits.
i’ve been using the beta for a few months now, and the speech to text is significantly better. Put in parentheses using apple speech to text
Some stuff, as you can see, isn’t perfect :-)
I don’t think it is parakeet v2 level, but it’s good enough to not be frustrating
How is the keyboard broken? Maybe I'm so used to whatever it is that I'm blind to it.
They have some nasty "dynamic tap zones" algorithm that dynamically resizes the hitbox for keys based on what it predicts you will type in order to reduce miss-taps. Anecdotally, it has just steadily been getting worse with every update. I swear I can be pressing the center of a key and it will select the next one over and immediately autocorrect to a completely different word than what I typed.
I had the pleasure of typing something on an Android the other day and it was such a breath of fresh air when it actually accepted the keys I was pressing...
What's hilarious is that typing was nearly perfect on my 3gs (with "iPhone OS 3"--back before it was even "iOS").
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Thank you for putting a name to this phenomenon. I hadn't gone through my yearly attempt to figure out why iOS was terrible for text entry. I figured since I only have an iPad and not an iPhone, and infrequently type in it, that it just hadn't learned my habits or words. It's incredible that they've developed these kinds of algorithms that have made every facet of text entry from speech to text to spell checking to typing itself such a miserable experience.
In addition to this, there is a delay in the suggested word such that when you see the options above the keyboard, decide you see the word you want, stop typing and move to select it, it changes right as you land your finger.
Oh wonderful. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m an author and Apple‘s dictionary appears to be missing about half the more uncommon words in the English language. It’ll never recognize “prescient” in dictation for example. Some words it marks in red because it thinks it’s a spelling error. I know it’s not because I’ve used it, read it, and it’s in online dictionaries.
At least I’m macOS I can use Talon instead of the system dictation.
Ah, so that’s why that happens? I was gaslighting myself.
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The best way to put it is it really wants to type what it wants to type, and if you deviate from that it will often end up just ignoring it. Whether it's the dynamic tap zones as mentioned elsewhere, or just auto correcting backwards and changing words you've already typed. Also when you go back and change a word it will also often insert additional spaces around the changed word. Or worse still if you mistype a word like say banana then backspan to ban and retype ana, it will display banana... Until you hit space and it turns it into "ban ana".
Try an android keyboard and go back to an iphone. Having switched back and forth between both systems it’s quite remarkable how bad the iphone keyboard is. In practice , typing on an iphone means constant typos, bad autofix, and bad suggestions.
I used to have galaxy S phones with some aftermarket keyboard whose name I forget. It was quite popular at the time, and was fairly happy with it.
When I moved from a gs5 to an iPhone 7, I was amazed at how much better the typing experience was. But it has now gotten to a point where I feel like a drunk monkey would type better than I do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45662685
I personally use the swiping keyboard on ios and it seems to detect the wrong word with an almost malicious frequency. It also randomly Capitalizes things.
For some reason, the one word that it just will not let me swipe is “and”. Which is, you know, somewhat common. I get all kinds of random things instead.
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I also use it all the time and I hate it very much. It almost never works right on the first try.
It's intriguing. Danny! Infuriating.
I think it's slightly worded if you swore. No. Slightly worded. No. Slightly worse if you swipe left handed. Yes. At last.
Each time you type the wrong letter there’s a big chance you didn’t miss but the keyboard typed the wrong key anyway.
Would have been totally gaslit by my iPad on this only I have an android phone to compare my typing accuracy on.
https://youtu.be/hksVvXONrIo - [It's Not Just You - The iOS Keyboard is Broken]
Typing German and Swiss German is entirely broken while English is fine on the Swiss German keyboard layout. It very often registers the wrong key even though a slow motion video shows very clearly that the finger hits the correct key initially.
I have an English/Italian bilingual keyboard set up as my default.
Every single f**n time I begin a sentence with "È" (Italian for "she/he/it is") - which is an extremely deliberate gesture - you have to keep the E tapped until the accents pop up - it will immediately correct it back to an unaccented "E". It's nuts.
There is a metric ton of intent behind my selecting, keeping tapped, waiting for the accents, picking one - it's so obviously NOT accidental, and this utterly cretinous piece of junk changes it .
Can't "autocorrect" be replaced to "autosuggest" instead like on android devices?
I have never been fan of autocorrection tools (especially as I am regularly writing in 4 different languages) regardless of the OS but definitely use autosuggestions to correct potential spelling errors.
1. Auto-correct inserts the wrong words into my sentences despite correct spelling and grammar. Think, "what a ducking joke". This has suddenly gotten better recently when it comes to typos, though.
2. The keyboard's AI will also helpfully misinterpret key presses and sub the wrong letter, which doesn't get corrected. For example, common acronyms get corrected to other acronyms I _never_ use. FFS turns into FFA regularly.
I really need the spacebar to expand slightly more on the right so my thumb doesn't miss it while typing. Wish it were customizable.
This! So many times have I hit one of the keys in the row above space. I think this might actually be caused by them resizing the hitbox because I am not that fat-fingered.
This is the “dynamic key area” in action
It's unclear to me if they're alleging that it's recently broken. I switched to iPhone at my wife's insistence 3-4 years ago and I have pined for Swype the entire time. It's so bad and I was spoiled by Android.
You can install a different keyboard if you want. I used 3rd party swiping keyboards but ended up using the system one for the last few years because it doesn't bother me.
What do you find lacking in iOS’s swipe keyboard implementation?
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macOS has the prior keycombo for 'home' and 'end' occupied for other uses.
I don't know how to read to the bottom of a webpage and jump immediately to the top of page.
Plus, the global key at bottom left fails for keyboard shortcut input when defining new binding for managing windowing rearrangement.
Your specific usecase has a native solve. Tap the status bar on any scrollable content view to scroll immediately to the top of the page. This has been around since, I believe, iPhone OS 1.
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try using swipe-type on an android and you'll see. the funny thing is it's been this way since the iphone 1 because iphone 1 didn't have swipe-type while very early android did (via "swype").
(adjacent to keyboard) It has no way to select all text. That makes the whole platform a toy.
It used to be there but a few releases ago the option disappeared.
In my experience new Siri has been better only marginally. Still tons of I didn’t understand the query responses
Marginally better? What kind of queries are you giving it? It's obviously not as capable as GPT, etc, but it's leaps and bounds better than the old Siri. There's no question about that.
> Siri is definitely worth using now, even if it remains still a work-in-progress/needs continued refinement. It can surprise you in good ways, but it isn't consistently good yet.
I really wish we could add our own custom prompts for the new Siri. My most common usage of Siri is "Remind me at XX:00 to do XYZ." The most common response from Siri now is, "Sorry, did you say XYZ or XZY?", where XYZ and XZY are two very similar things between which the difference is inconsequential.
Dealing with this "Sorry" response has made reminders take annoying extra steps. Wish I could throw in a "If I'm setting a reminder and you don't quite hear me, just put both things in one reminder and I'll figure it out myself" to the prompt.
I too feel the keyboard is broken but I haven't identified exactly what is broken about it.
its when you type it wrong two times, and then slowly type it. Then it works.
I had issues with the Siri Beta. I would ask it to open the garage door, and often it just... failed.
Un-enrolling from the beta fixed it.
If the iOS keyboard is broken in terms of auto correct suggestions, try resetting its dictionary. I found it was much improved after that.
What's better about it in your usage?
re keyboard: i don't get how the keyboard on the iphone can be so broken. meanwhile the small keyboard on the ipad works like a charm.
or am i the only one experiencing it like this?
I was starting to think I was getting old and senile with how hard typing has become on the iPhone. It's a misery. I have to type so insanely slow to have any chance of getting the right keys now. I don't have this issue on other virtual keyboards, iPad etc.