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baryon

macrumors 601
Original poster
I think we can all agree that the default iOS keyboard sucks: Autocorrect won't recognize simple typos yet it will "correct" words that are already correct, and it has major issues with suffixes and prefixes and has no clue about which keys are next to each other. Multilingual typing also sucks because it only works with a small handful of languages, while with most languages you must manually switch from one language to the other, which of course I always forget to do until I'm mid-sentence with every single word "corrected" to the wrong language. Swipe typing only works in English but not other languages, and so on. In short, the iOS keyboard is unusable and always has been, with no hope for any change.

We have SwiftKey and GBoard, neither of which have seen updates in the past 4 years or so. And yet, they are the only options if you want to type without going completely insane. They're both buggy as hell and their autocorrect is getting worse every year, but it's still much better than iOS.

I don't understand why no one is trying to improve this situation. Why aren't there AI companies making a "smart keyboard"? All it would have to do is copy/paste what you type into ChatGPT and ask it to fix it up. It would work 99% of the time. I'm sure most people would gladly pay money to finally get a keyboard that doesn't suck. There haven't even been any attempts at paid keyboard for iOS as far as I know. It seems like such an easy thing to do: make a keyboard, add a simple dictionary that updates regularly or connect it to ChatGPT and let that figure it out.

We have these super advanced devices that we literally use for everything, and they still can't do the one thing that's arguably the most important thing: typing. It would be trivial to fix, and lots of money could be made. Hell there's even local AI running on them now, so we could use that to do autocorrect without any additional subscription fees. Why has no one thought of this? We use AI for stupid emojis yet we can't use it for something useful like autocorrect. I don't get it.
 
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If I had to guess, because most people don’t care that the default isn’t great. Those that do don’t want a third party product accessing their every keystroke, because tech savvy people are more guarded about their data privacy. And many corporate apps block their use anyway.
 
I actually rather like the standard keyboard, rarely have to battle the autocorrect function either.

If it works and looks acceptable I can’t imagine most consumers bothering to look for an alternative.
 
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I think we can all agree that the default iOS keyboard sucks: Autocorrect won't recognize simple typos yet it will "correct" words that are already correct, and it has major issues with suffixes and prefixes and has no clue about which keys are next to each other. Multilingual typing also sucks because it only works with a small handful of languages, while with most languages you must manually switch from one language to the other, which of course I always forget to do until I'm mid-sentence with every single word "corrected" to the wrong language. Swipe typing only works in English but not other languages, and so on. In short, the iOS keyboard is unusable and always has been, with no hope for any change.

We have SwiftKey and GBoard, neither of which have seen updates in the past 4 years or so. And yet, they are the only options if you want to type without going completely insane. They're both buggy as hell and their autocorrect is getting worse every year, but it's still much better than iOS.

I don't understand why no one is trying to improve this situation. Why aren't there AI companies making a "smart keyboard"? All it would have to do is copy/paste what you type into ChatGPT and ask it to fix it up. It would work 99% of the time. I'm sure most people would gladly pay money to finally get a keyboard that doesn't suck. There haven't even been any attempts at paid keyboard for iOS as far as I know. It seems like such an easy thing to do: make a keyboard, add a simple dictionary that updates regularly or connect it to ChatGPT and let that figure it out.

We have these super advanced devices that we literally use for everything, and they still can't do the one thing that's arguably the most important thing: typing. It would be trivial to fix, and lots of money could be made. Hell there's even local AI running on them now, so we could use that to do autocorrect without any additional subscription fees. Why has no one thought of this? We use AI for stupid emojis yet we can't use it for something useful like autocorrect. I don't get it.

I wholeheartedly agree with all this. My main gripe being the fact that autocorrect just stops working and flickers without correcting anything anymore after typing a long message. The fix is to switch language and then back, but it gets annoying. I've had this since iOS 26.0, and it's been there up to the latest iOS 27 beta.
 
I guess their rate of return just sucks. The built in keyboard has gotten worse. How is it not correctly spelling y'all, it just puts it as yall and then shows y'all at the bottom as a suggestion. Come on man.
 
My best keyboard is attached to my laptop =)

I've enjoyed my original iPad Pro with Apple's keyboard case, when I do use it (still works fine).. it's interesting seeing this post, as I wasn't aware that options for iPad keyboards slimmed down. At one point, I enjoyed a wireless keyboard with an iPad - it was nice to type while the screen was portrait!

Last I tried a third-party iPad keyboard, I thought the Logitech line was pretty nice: https://www.logitech.com/en-us/shop/c/ipad-keyboards
 
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