Yeah I’ve noticed it sometimes seems to get worse. Don’t know what phone you use, but when I use Google’s voice-to-text on Android, I often have to correct mistakes, because it tries to do it word-by-word, but sometimes what I actually intend is not clear until I’ve spoken the whole sentence - and for whatever reason, Google very rarely goes back and changes a word it’s already transcribed. For instance, if I say, “I think your speaking” it’s not yet clear if that should be a “your” or a “you’re”, and it won’t become clear until I complete the sentence/clause.

If I want to dictate a long piece of text, I will use OpenAI’s text-to-speech, which is almost flawless (it doesn’t start transcribing until you’ve finished everything you’re going to say). I appreciate some people don’t like OpenAI, but to be honest, Google isn’t much better, and likewise Apple is not a lot better than Google.

Well spelling was solved even earlier than that, with rote-learning at school in combination with the very environmentally friendly technologies known as the paddle and cane. What was wrong with that way of doing things?? Is it progress? Or were things better in the old days?

In any case, all the words in the sentence in question are spelt correctly - the problem is grammar. Correctly determining if the grammar of a sentence is correct is a much harder problem than simply checking the spelling of words against a dictionary.

I’m using voice to text like right now

AI really has come a very long way hasn’t it. It was not that long ago that you had to train the computer on your own voice and even then accuracy was annoyingly bad. Now it can transcribe speech from just about anyone at much better levels of accuracy.

Yes you got it! The person I replied to was talking about those inline grammar checkers you have in word processors, which are pretty limited in value so I wanted to show what you could do with an LLM, and how it can go beyond just correcting but also helping learning.

I did think about adding a sentence to say to imagine writing in some important official context e.g. a letter to a government agency rather than a comment on Lemmy, but decided in the end it would probably be obvious.

It’s a *lot* better these days. Here’s how you could use it to improve the English in your comment:

Can you point out and characterise the grammar mistakes in the following sentence, with tips on how the writer could avoid similar mistakes in future - “I must admit its been a while, but all these things where horrible last time i played with them.”

Sure — that sentence has a few grammar issues, each pointing to a common kind of slip. Here’s the breakdown:

1. “its been a while” → “it’s been a while”

Mistake: “its” is a possessive pronoun (like his, her, their), while “it’s” is the contraction of “it has”. Fix: Use “it’s” because the writer means “it has been a while”.

Tip: When in doubt, try expanding “it’s” to “it is” or “it has” and see if the sentence still makes sense. If it doesn’t, you probably want “its”.

2. “where horrible” → “were horrible”

Mistake: “where” (a location) is confused with “were” (past tense of are). Fix: Use “were” to correctly form the past tense of “to be”.

Tip: Say it aloud—“they were horrible” sounds natural, while “they where horrible” doesn’t. If it’s a verb (they were), you want “were”.

3. “i played” → “I played”

Mistake: Lowercase “i”. Fix: Always capitalize “I” when it’s a pronoun referring to oneself.

Tip: This is more about habit than logic—just train yourself to always type “I” in uppercase, even in casual writing.

Full corrected version: “I must admit it’s been a while, but all these things were horrible last time I played with them.”