Wow, I... didn't know that gesture was a thing. Thank you! It seems to help a bit! I'm now getting a 50/50 son/soon ratio. That said: when I manually type "soon" -- definitely with a double "o" -- it still autocorrects to "son" on the first try. So, going to keep my pet theory intact.

The weird thing is that if I type nothing at all, the contextual predicted "next word" on GBoard is actually very good -- I wasn't praising it for comedic effect. But it really does seem like there's a sign error in a sort function which kicks in after you start typing.

If this comment is what teaches me I've been expected to do that, I'm going to throw my toys out of the pram.

I've specifically googled for instructions on how I might be expected to use the swipe-style keyboards, and turned up nothing.

As far as I know it's in the tutorial they insist you do upon first enabling swiping

edit: Don't actually see a tutorial in the app. Maybe I'm confused with another app such as Swype, but the same technique seems to apply to all.

I'm pretty sure Swype did explain it, and I know SwiftKey has this gesture as well (though I don't remember if it was ever explained to the user or just assumed they'd remember it from Swype).

The default keyboard on my Android didn't have any such tutorial. I did look in the app and online.

Swype taught me, it has helpful tips and I still use their keyboard to this day

Swipe style keyboard? How does that effect spelling ? So confused - I get how it changes to "predict," anticipate or whatever the AI engineers say but what I don't understand is changing a real word to a non-word. That's not intelligence. That's something else and I don't know what they get from changing word to a misspelled and nonexistent word other than eventually driving the human race insane: I'm going to be a Luddite;

Er, "son" and "soon" are both real dictionary words. Swipe-style keyboards use an internal dictionary to find the most likely match to the swiped pattern, and have methods for adding new words (mine for example automatically adds any tapped-out words after you hit space).