From the course: iOS 16: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

Predictive text and Quickpath typing

From the course: iOS 16: iPhone and iPad Essential Training

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Predictive text and Quickpath typing

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- [Instructor] Now let's take a look at working with text and the onscreen keyboard in iOS. I'm going to use the Notes app for this example. And I'll create a new note by tapping the button here in the lower right hand corner. And I'll start typing a note of things to do today. (keys pressing) I'll tap return. And below that, I want to start typing the phrase in no particular order. (keys pressing) Now, notice as you type that the iPhone offers suggestions here above the keyboard. This is referred to as predictive text. I've typed enough of the word particular that the iPhone is suggesting what I meant to type here. And if one of these suggestions is correct, I just tap it and the word is completed for me. If it wasn't the word I wanted, I could have just continued typing and ignored the suggestion. And I can continue typing the word order, notice after O-R, that word appears as one of the suggestions, and I'll select it. All right, so we just saw that the iPhone is watching me type and will offer suggestions so I don't have to type out complete words. The iPhone suggestions and corrections are one of the key factors in being a fast and efficient typist on its keyboard. Even if you've misspelled a word, the iPhone can usually figure out what word you meant based on the letters near the ones you typed. So if I go down a couple lines here and I type something like pick up laundry, (keys pressing) but I misspell the word laundry, notice it immediately suggests the correct spelling of laundry. When the word is highlighted like this, I can just tap a space, and the change is instantly made. It's important to remember that pressing space is telling the iPhone that its suggestion is correct. If the suggestion is not correct, tap the current spelling that appears to the left of the predicted text area to leave it as is. Also, iOS has a universal spell checker, so in most apps, misspelled words will be underlined with a red dotted line like you see in many word processors. So for example, if I delete laundry and deliberately misspell it again, (keys pressing) and press a space, notice the word gets underlined. When I tap that, a suggestion for the properly spelled version appears, and I'll tap that to correct my spelling. Keep in mind that your device will remember which suggestions you've ignored, and it will also learn the words you use most often that it doesn't recognize and add them to its internal dictionary. So after time, it will stop trying to correct words that you've told it are not typos. Right, so that's pretty much how typing and auto correction have worked in iOS since the beginning. But iOS also includes a typing feature called Quick Path. The idea is that in addition to typing by tapping letters one at a time (keys pressing) like I've been doing so far, you can also swipe your finger over the letters in one continuous motion without lifting your finger from the screen. So if I wanted to type the word oranges, for example, I would start by placing my finger on the letter O and then glide to every other letter to spell oranges. For some people, this is a much faster and more accurate way to enter text, especially if you're entering text with one hand. And iOS is very good at figuring out what word you mean to type based on the order and proximity of the letters you're touching. For example, I'll type fat free strawberry yogurt. And that was a lot faster than typing out all those letters. And notice you don't have to type a space between words. Simply lifting your finger off the screen tells iOS that you're done typing a word. Now, the predictive text bar above the keyboard is also useful here in case iOS doesn't guess the word you mean. So you can see here I get some other options in case it didn't type the word that I wanted. In this case, it just pluralized the word mustard, so I can just tap the predictive text here to select the singular version. Now, if this isn't working for you, you can go to Settings, to General and Keyboard, and here, make sure slide to type is enabled. That's what lets you use Quick Path. Also note that Quick Path isn't available on the iPad's full size keyboard. It's only available on the floating keyboard. I'll show you what that means in an upcoming movie on iPad only keyboard features. So it definitely takes some practice, but the nice thing is you don't have to switch keyboards or enable anything special to use Quick Path. You can type some words letter by letter as you've always done (keys pressing) and swipe to type other words.

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