As I wrote my latest message to ChatGPT today something inside me broke. I hit Send, then looked back at what I’d written, and noticed that the message was once again littered with typos.
“Sorry, it’s very har ld to type on an iPhone keyboard.” I typed next, as if to prove my point. Sigh.
At this point I decided that this couldn’t go on. I’d had it with the iPhone keyboard, and I was going to experiment with its settings until I found a way to make it better. In the end it didn’t take me long to identify the main culprit — Predictive Text.
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If your messages to ChatGPT, or even just friends on text, are equally strewn with bizarre mistakes and words, then one of Apple’s supposedly helpful keyboard features could be making things worse.
Turning off Predictive Text is a revelation
You’ll find the off switch inside Settings > General > Keyboard > Predictive Text. Just slide it to off. I noticed the difference almost immediately. The keyboard suddenly felt calmer, and I stopped finding so many bizarre words in my ChatGPT prompts.
Here’s the thing I hadn’t appreciated: Predictive Text and Auto-Correction aren’t the same feature. You can turn off Apple’s attempts to guess what you’re going to say next without losing the spelling corrections you actually want.
Predictive Text uses the words you’ve already typed, the context of the sentence and patterns it’s learned from your writing to suggest the word or phrase it thinks is coming next. The suggestions appear above the text and inline as grey text. Tapping the spacebar will accept the suggestion.
The problem is that when you’re writing prompts in ChatGPT you’re usually writing unusual, specific sentences, not generic text messages, in which it can more accurately predict what words are likely to come next, so the predictions can be less useful.
With Predictive Text enabled, my iPhone is constantly offering words and completions as I type. Auto-Correction is also working in the background, so the overall experience feels like I’m fighting the keyboard: I type something, hit the spacebar, and suddenly the text isn’t quite what I thought I’d written. With Predictive Text turned off, all of that visual noise disappears, while Auto-Correction can continue fixing obvious spelling mistakes.
Try it for a day and see how you get on. There are a couple of other keyboard tricks that are well worth trying too, which I’ll share below.
Reset your Keyboard Dictionary
Another thing you can try is resetting the Keyboard Dictionary. Years of typos, names, jargon and accidentally accepted corrections have polluted your learned dictionary, leading to bad suggestions in Auto-Correction. What you need is a fresh start.
Go to Settings > General > Transfer or Reset iPhone > Reset > Reset Keyboard Dictionary. This wipes the custom words your keyboard has learned and returns it to its default state. Just be very careful not to accidentally choose to reset your whole iPhone!
Set up Text Replacements for ChatGPT
If you want another handy tip for using AI on your iPhone, check out the Text Replacement feature. This is for things like “omw” which turn into “On my way!” when typed. The full text appears, and you can insert it by tapping the space bar.
If there are things you type a lot of the time in ChatGPT then you can create Text Replacement features for them. For example ;short could expand to “Keep your answer concise and don’t repeat my question”, or ;spoiler could become “Don’t reveal anything beyond the episode I’ve told you I’ve watched.”
This is a genuinely useful ChatGPT power-user trick. To enable this feature go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement, then tap the + button. Enter the full instruction in the Phrase box and the short version you want to type in Shortcut.
One bonus trick
My last favorite keyboard feature is the spacebar cursor. You probably know this, but if you don’t then it’s another revelation for making text edits to things you’ve typed on an iPhone. Hold down the spacebar and the entire keyboard becomes a trackpad, so you can precisely reposition the cursor when ChatGPT prompts get long.
Turning Predictive Text off still remains the best thing I’ve done on my iPhone for a while. I think the original idea behind Predictive Text was good, and if I’m only ever typing a few text messages a day on my iPhone then I can live with it. But in the age of AI, where I’m continually writing long prompts into ChatGPT, I’m better off without it. Let me know how you get on if you disable it too.
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