Slide-to-type changes previous words even with autocorrect and predictive turned off. PLEASE LET US DISABLE THIS!

I get many of them every day, but here’s a choice example of how poorly this implementation works from a few minutes ago:

I wanted to type “lucky first guess.” I swiped “lucky first” and everything was correct. Then, as I finished swiping “guess,” it changed the phrase to “lucky forest fires” right in front of my eyes. Of course that’s what I meant to say. Forest fires are very lucky. Oh wait. No they’re not. :-/

I realize swipe-typers are probably in the minority since iPhones forced tap-typing on everyone for a long time, but those of us who became proficient with swiping on other phones much prefer the speed and ergonomics of that compared to the cramped two-handed experience of thumb typing. Please improve the slide-to-type implementation, Apple.

Agreed 100%. There’s something uniquely aggravating about having your words changed after you’ve already taken the care to type them correctly. It’s like your phone is actively and purposefully working against what you’re trying to say.

If any Apple devs read this, it just did it again in that previous sentence: it changed “care” to “case” three times until I finally tap-typed it.

Changing words that have already been entered is absurd, and a terrible user experience. I think it has successfully corrected an error for me once or twice at most, ever. But it has created errors hundreds of times, easily. Maybe even thousands by now.

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, having to touch the spacebar between each word really puts a kink in the efficiency of how slide typing is supposed to work.

Coming from the Android world, I have used “swype” keyboards since the original, and have tried many different ones. In my opinion, the original Swype-branded keyboard was the best, and I could type faster with it than even the most proficient tap-typers.

For my tastes, it had two big advantages:

(1) You could use it without any predictive or autocorrect behaviors. To me, that is a major plus.

(2) For every word you swiped, it would show several alternate words in a row across the top of the keyboard. If it got the swiped word wrong, the correct alternate would almost always be in that row. You just had to touch it, and it would swap the last entered word with the one you touched.

I really wish Apple would duplicate that same implementation. It was the perfect compromise of speed, manual entry, and efficient correction. I realize some people may enjoy predictive & autocorrect, but I am not one of them. It isn’t correct often enough to make things faster for me, and it introduces errors and miscommunication more often than it prevents them, in my experience.

Thanks for this reply. I have done as you suggested and reported it via the feedback tool. (And just as I typed that last sentence, it changed “reported” to “repeated” after I typed the next word. Having to fix words that were already entered correctly should go on Apple’s list of “never make a user do this!”)