Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Anima_ | Hacker News Reader

I live in the French speaking part of Belgium and have configured all my devices in English for the past 15+ years.

Apparently Google consider that if you are geo IP located in Belgium with your devices in English, you _have to be_ a Dutch speaker. While I would agree that French speaking Belgians are in majority using French UIs, there are exceptions. Please respect my browser settings!

The solution? I have to put French in my browser accepted languages (not necessarily first) and then Google understand I'm not a Dutch speaker and will stick to English.

View on HN

For me it's often the other way around... system language is English but where possible (e.g. browser) I indicate Dutch/Flemish can also be used. Still, many websites seem to think that they should default to their French version despite my settings and even geo IP putting me in the non-French part...

I wish they would stop guessing and just listen to the hints...

How did you even figure that one out?

Exactly my thought! Imagine the time spent on this..

Came across the solution by chance, a couple of years ago. It's really maddening.

I live in France, speak French, but work with English as my primary language.

So, I had to make the same settings change, otherwise google would keep putting French searches before English ones (despite the fact that I searched with English keywords).

I don't remember how I found this, but it might something along the lines of "I'm really annoyed today, let's fix this NOW". When you speak 2 languages or more, and they don't match with your location, Google, Microsoft, and most other big tech companies go completely nuts. So, you get used to fiddling with languages settings.

I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language.

PS: Speech recognition, autocorrect, and mobile keyboards : Same problem.

PS2: Apple get it right most of the time.

> I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language.

Funny, if anything probably 80%+ of the eng folks in Europe for big tech speak more than one language (everyone who's not from UK or Ireland).

This is why I think Google assistant is absolutely useless. Try to call someone who has a name in X language on a device that is set to English. You just can't. I love Big tech circle jerk about diversity, that somehow stops at skincolor, gender and sexual identity. You happens to bilingual? Sorry our cutting edge AI can't handle that.

Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example "OK Google, Call *in german/dutch/French/etc* <after this command everything will be interpreted on the given language, for the rest of the voice input>. See, it's not that hard.

> Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example "OK Google, Call in german/dutch/French/etc <after this command everything will be interpreted on the given language, for the rest of the voice input>. See, it's not that hard.

I had the exact same idea, it seems Google really lack good product design.

I think they discovered the trick. Default headers might be ignored, but anything non default (e.g. en-gb, two languages, etc.) is assumed to be correct.

Shit, where were you all these years?

I wonder if you could also use en_GB with the same effect (though if your hack is working it's probably not worth changing).

This should be its own submission to HN

Reply on news.ycombinator.com