What you’re seeing on your iPad is actually a relatively new iOS 9 feature that’s available across the entire iPad line — including the slick new iPad Pro — along with all the iPhones in the market — including the iPhone 6s — and any iPod units that can actually run iOS 9 (not all can). It’s stolen from, urm, I mean “inspired by” a similar feature on Android that’s one of the best loved features of the competing mobile operating system.
What’s the other one, Dave? I can hear you ask. Turns out that the “swype” keyboard or another type of continuous gesture entry system is still a glaring missing option on Apple devices, notably the iPhone line, but perhaps some day…
Anyway, back to your question. Apple calls what you’re asking about the Predictive Keyboard and it’s a simple setting to switch on or off.
To start, here I am in “Notes”, entering some data. You’ll notice that there are some additional options above the individual key graphics unique to this particular app, but no predictive words:
Let’s leave the app and go to Settings instead.
Find General and swipe down to get to the section that includes Keyboard, as shown:
See it? Between Dave & Time and Language & Region. Heck, with all those ampersands, maybe it should be “Key & Board”? Maybe not. 🙂
Tap on it to get to the surprisingly large number of keyboard settings in iOS 9:
You can see “Predictive” is the one setting I have disabled on my own list, among the long list of things iOS 9 can do to make your life easier on data input.
Tap the on/off switch to change setting — I’ll turn it on — and that’s all you have to do. Fixed!
Now go back to the “Notes” app and you’ll see that the input keyboard is a bit different:
And that’s all you need to do, whether you’re on an iPhone, iPad or iPod.
Now, as to the smarts of the prediction system itself, that I can’t attest to…
