had the ability to look up contact names
Currently, there is no option to have the app access my contacts, so it doesn't use them for suggestions.
it would be great if that was enabled, and also to make it work for swiping as well
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@borisb13 this is in 2.1.3, the next App Store update. Names from your contacts now show up in the suggestion bar once you type the first few letters, and you can swipe them too. There's a switch under Suggestions & corrections, called Names from Contacts, and it's on by default. The keyboard doesn't ask for Contacts permission: iOS hands contact names to keyboards itself, and I keep them in memory only, nothing is saved or synced. One limit: a name that's also a regular word, like Rose or Mark, keeps behaving like the word.
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Thanks, and that's great! But I did notice a related issue, and I'm not sure if I should create a separate request for it. Basically, people's name's in general (not just my contacts) don't seem to be in the swiping dictionary. I've been just adding them one by one, but even the most popular names, like Mike or Michael, don't get detected. And most of the time, they don't even show up in the suggestion bar. And when they do, it's only for super common names, like Mike or Joe, but even then it's the last suggestion.
Maybe you can add a toggle for something like "prioritize names" or "prioritize common names" so that they automatically get typed when they're swiped
I'll look into it.
It would be more helpful if the suggested contacts appear as full names.
@Nikhil.tom iOS hands keyboards first and last names from Contacts as separate words with no link between them, so I can't build "Boris Becker" out of that. What works now: after you've typed a full name once, the last name comes up as the next word after the first name, capitalized. Before, it showed up as "becker". That's in build 426 and in 2.1.3 on the App Store. Full names from the very first time would need Contacts permission in the app, and I'm not adding that for now.
@borisb13 found the cause, and it wasn't missing names. Michael, Joe, David, Sarah and about 800 others were in the dictionary, but ranked as the rarest words in English, so a swipe picked "marry" over Mary and "pail" over Paul, and in the bar they showed up last. That's fixed in 2.1.3, the next App Store update. On my test set of 45 common names a clean swipe now lands on the name 127 times out of 135, before it was 103. Mike, John, Tom, Peter and a few others had a different problem: they came out lowercase. They're capitalized now when you swipe them or pick them from the bar, and if you type "mike" letter by letter it stays as you typed it. I skipped the "prioritize names" switch, with the ranking fixed it shouldn't be needed. Names that aren't in the dictionary at all, like Olivia or Noah, still need adding once. If a common name still loses, tell me which one and what you got instead.
that's great, thank you. I'm sure the between your fixes, and the fact that it will now also go through my contact names, it should be just fine