When I swipe “don’t” in Gboard, at least 30% of the time it decides I mean “didn’t”. I just tested it, and the accuracy was shockingly bad. I’d understand if the strokes were very similar, but “didn’t” has a whole extra stroke in it compared to “don’t”. WTF, Google?

  • Gboard used to be flawless for swipe typing, but in the last year or so I’ve noticed the autocorrect become far less reliable and actually prone to replacing the word I wanted with something else. They must have made some change within the last couple of years.

  • Hell I’m still trying to figure out why the spell checker changes “i’ll” to “i’LLC” every time I type it. Auto-correct on phones is just worthless and I spend far more time correcting it than I do trying to correct actual mistakes.

  • I can’t even get Gboard to capitalize “i” FFS, you expect it to do something even more complicated!? The state of keyboards are so bad today. I remember when you could vaguely type or swipe in Swype or Swiftkey and it would get your word correct most of the time, now they all fucking suck, Swiftkey just happens to suck slightly less than GBoard.

    • For it to do that, “Auto-Correct” in the Gboard settings has to be on. You can also kind of accidentally kill a feature like this by having a single lowercase i added to the dictionary. If you have, just remove it like someone showed above. Note: there is no list of words in the options anywhere where you can see the list, you can do it while typing anywhere though. Just type a single I, press space, then backspace, then drag the single “i” entry from the suggestions to the trash that appears when you hold the i.

      side note: I have typed this comment using Gboard glide, and I had to correct a total of 2 words. Everything else was recognized as intended.

  • Gboard was never really good at picking up strokes. Honestly, nothing ever managed to come close to the accuracy of Swype & Dragon, which is why I’m still using it even 5 years after being discontinued. You can get the apk easily, but unfortunately it won’t survive much longer when google enforces a new API version on Android.

    Though I’ve heard of modded versions that should still work… Here’s to hoping. That app has been with me for 14 years.

  • Agh Gboard. Sorry I don’t have a better answer but if anybody knows a privacy-friendly android keyboard that’s got quick GIF access and this swipe-typing, that’d make my day and I’d gladly spend the time re-training my thumbs.

  • I tried it on mine, but couldn’t get it to happen. It’s possible that Gboard might be trying to make a grammatical correction. Not to imply that you don’t know how to write, but something that needs to be asked from a troubleshooting perspective: Are you sure you’re using the correct word for the sentence?

    Also, and this might be an annoying step to take but, does it continue after clearing the Gboard app settings completely? I think Gboard will also make “habitual” corrections based on your usage, so it could also be possible that it thinks you frequently delete “don’t” and replace it with “didn’t”, and is trying to preemptively correct it.