Does anyone know, or can anyone guess, the business case for predictive text? On phone apps, it is often incredibly difficult to turn off. Why is that, do you think? (The examples I have recent experience with are Facebook and Outlook mobile apps.)
I would have thought that, for AI training purposes, they would want humans typing things and not just regurgitating canned responses. But apparently not?
On Android you can just install another keyboard if your current one doesn’t have a setting for this.
If I had to guess a business case, I’d say that predictive text as a feature gives you a “legitimate reason” to send your typing data to Google or whoever to train the prediction engine, and they want that data.
How come the apps are controlling your keyboard? Shouldn’t it use your phone’s selected keyboard?
I have disabled autocorrect in my (android) keyboard settings. That disables it system wide, works for me.
I assume you don’t mean keyboard text predictions, which would be a different thing, but the platforms.
It’s a new convenience feature. Something they as a platform can shine with, retain users, and set themselves apart from other platforms.
Having training data is not the primary potential gain. It’s user investment, retention, and interaction. Users choosing the generated text is valid training data. Whether they chose similar words, or what was suggested, is still input on user choice.
It does lead to a convergence to a centralized standard speak. With a self-strengthening feedback loop.
On Android, most apps depend on the keyboard.
- Gboard has a configurable suggestions bar where you can pick words, or not.
- Microsoft SwiftKey works similarly, but it underlines the word you’re typing.
- AnySoftKeyboard works like Swiftkey.
Only exception I’ve seen, is Copilot, which shows the suggested word directly, to be selected with [tab], but you can still type a different one.
I’ve noticed no such behavior on Facebook. Have you checked your keyboard settings?
