Allow email addresses and words containing dots, hyphens or special characters in personal dictionary suggestions

[scwall]

I have another issue with the personal dictionary and suggestion system.

At the moment, it seems that Dictate stops treating the text as a single word as soon as certain characters are entered, such as:

• "."
• "-"
• "@"

Because of this, I cannot easily add some very common entries to the personal dictionary from the suggestion bar.

For example:

• "firstname.lastname@example.com"
• "support@company.com"
• "company-name"
• "product-name"
• "name-name"
• "internal.domain"
• technical names containing dots or hyphens

If I start typing a normal unknown word, Dictate can show it in the suggestion bar and I can long-press it to add it to the dictionary.

But as soon as I type a dot or a hyphen, the suggestion is interrupted and the full text is no longer offered as one candidate.

This makes it impossible to save many useful personal entries directly from the keyboard.

Example

If I type:

"mycompany"

I can potentially add it to the dictionary.

But if I type:

"my-company"

or:

"my.company"

the suggestion system stops at the separator and I can no longer add the complete value.

The same problem makes it difficult or impossible to save email addresses such as:

"firstname.lastname@example.com"

Suggested behavior

It would be useful if Dictate could recognize some strings containing punctuation as valid dictionary/suggestion candidates.

For example:

• email addresses
• hyphenated words
• words containing dots
• technical identifiers
• domain-like names

The keyboard could continue treating these strings as a single candidate while they are being typed.

For email addresses, this could possibly depend on the input field type, so that email-like tokens are handled differently when the app reports an email input field.

Possible implementation

Instead of always considering punctuation as a hard word boundary, Dictate could allow certain characters inside a token when they appear between valid characters.

For example:

• "word-word"
• "word.word"
• "name@example.com"

A dot at the end of a sentence should still behave as punctuation, but a dot surrounded by letters or numbers could remain part of the current token.

The same idea could apply to hyphens and "@".

Personal dictionary

It would also be useful if these entries could be:

• added to the personal dictionary from the suggestion bar
• suggested again later
• used as shortcuts/autocompletions if supported

This would be especially useful for:

• personal email addresses
• company names
• technical product names
• server/domain names
• internal terminology
• names containing hyphens

Why this matters

Many useful personal dictionary entries are not simple alphabetic words.

For technical users in particular, dots and hyphens are extremely common.

Being able to save and reuse entries such as email addresses or technical names would make the personal dictionary much more useful.