You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

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

The "slide-to-type" aka "Quick Path" keyboard in iOS has an extremely annoying behavior: even with predictive text and autocorrect turned off, it will often change a previously-entered word after typing the next one.


As an example, let's take the sentence "I'm eating dinner in an hour." Here is an example of how this obnoxious behavior might play out:


You type "I'm eating..." and it's correct.


You keep typing: "I'm eating dinner..."


After you finish typing the word dinner, it suddenly changes the prior word to: "I'm hating dinner..."


There is no way to disable this, and it's incredibly annoying, because most of the time it replaces a *correct* word that you already typed with a wrong substitution.


The word swaps it makes are often nonsensical in context, and since it changes the word prior to the one you're currently typing, you have to delete both the word you're entering as well as the previous one.


Even more annoying, since it decided your original word was wrong and already replaced it, if you re-swipe the same word, it'll start going through a bunch of alternatives instead of the word you originally intended, which was already there before it decided to replace it for you.


This ends up turning into a very aggravating back-and-forth of having words change themselves, then having to delete at least two words to fix it, and then often having to tap-type the correct word since the keyboard has decided the original/correct word wasn't what you wanted.


I've lost count of how many times I've sent errors in messages due to this. Since you already typed the word correctly before it swapped it, your brain sees it that way and is less likely to notice replacements that happen afterward. So not only are the errors it creates a chore to fix, but you're much less likely to notice them than a typo on the word you're currently typing.


Please, please, please allow us to turn off this prior-word autocorrection for the slide-to-type keyboard. I loathe auto-correct already, and disable it on everything, but there is no way to fully disable it when using slide-to-type.

iPhone 12 Pro

Posted on Feb 10, 2022 4:01 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Feb 24, 2022 6:33 AM

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.

Similar questions

7 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Feb 24, 2022 6:33 AM in response to RodrigoEZ

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.

Feb 21, 2022 3:31 PM in response to SwirlyMaple

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.

Feb 24, 2022 12:37 AM in response to SwirlyMaple

I’ve been an Android user basically my whole life and since last year I changed to apple and I am going crazy with the swipe keyboard changing the previous word when It was already correct, I do duolingo everyday and I’ve had my perfect score broken because this stupid behavior, it’s so infuriating! Even with auto correct, check spelling and predictive turned off, it stills mess up things, I really hope the fix this soon, I’ve started to consider going back to android

Feb 14, 2022 6:31 PM in response to mysteryegg

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.

Feb 11, 2022 2:44 PM in response to SwirlyMaple

Thanks for reaching out, SwirlyMaple.


It sounds like you'd like to leave feedback about your experience using the iOS keyboard on your iPhone. We can help.


While you provide a lot of great information, keep in mind that the Apple Support Communities is primarily a user-to-user forum, and suggestions like these are not reviewed by Apple.


Instead, you can follow this link if you'd like to submit Product Feedback.


Hope that helps.


Take care.

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

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.