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?

  • I think predictive text predates even Android and smartphones (but not exactly), when we had to press a key 3 times until specific characters appeared; called T9 and just a dictionary. Having or not having a dictionary suggestion was the difference between life and death. Now the modern smartphone has way more compute power and resources, therefore they can analyze text in more depth. It’s just the logical next step to the plain and simple dictionary.