How can you disable the "smart" emoji suggestions (macOS Sonoma)

dana woodman wrote:

dear Steve Job's ghost, please grant me the power to turn off this **** feature

Ghosts aren't real, and Apple doesn't read here for feedback or suggestions. You can, however, let them know your thoughts here:

Product Feedback - Apple

I don't use the emoji picker for text replacement. I use it for punctuating text. Therefore, suggestions are pretty much always wrong. I'm not so basic that I would type "bananas🍌." I'm the guy who writes "bananas🙊."

Please add a preference to allow me to disable replacement and use the emoji picker how I like.🗿🕹️

I *hate* this "feature" so much. Everyone uses emoji differently, and I NEVER want the ones they suggest. It's astonishing that UI/UX changes like this get through without anyone raising an objection.

Just like we can turn off autocorrect for words we need to be able to turn this off for emoji, permanently.

Must admit sometimes it does suggest and sometimes it does not.

No really patterned I can see though 😂

This feature is very frustrating.

dear Steve Job's ghost, please grant me the power to turn off this **** feature

oh, carp. disabling and re-enabling the emoji picker in Keyboard has removed the picker modal altogether. now the Character Viewer opens. UGH!

OK fixed it by clicking this.

Where is that thing you said you clicked on? I don't recognize it and can't find it.

yeah:

1. it's a bad feature

2. what's more it's inconsistent and just randomly appears sometimes. I tried to reproduce it but I couldn't 😂

I logged in for the first time ever in these forums just to say that I also completely, entirely and utterly despise this feature, and I hope sooner than later that this is fully removed.

Whoever thought of this "feature" needs to UN-think of this feature. It's truly awful.

I signed up for this apple discussions board just to say how annoying this change is.

I don't see this in Keyboard Settings - where is it please? Thank you!

macOS 14.4.1 Sonoma, System Settings -> Keyboard

This is driving me up the wall and I'm seriously considering downgrading back to Ventura because of this. What a terrible, terrible uncontrollable feature that nobody ever asked for.