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Comment by deepGem | Hacker News Reader

This gets exacerbated if you are using a different language, like we Indians do. Type Hindi/Kannada/Tamil in English. Your autocorrect/predict word steers in the direction of most frequently used language and screws up all your pure english comms. Can still live with autocorrect but absolutely hate this ML based predictive nonsense, and I have completely disabled it.

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I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well. I type a mix of Dutch and English on my phone, because that's how I talk. But there is no reliable way to say "use both". It's one or the other.

The is one problem with letting Americans design things. They don't understand that the rest of the world regularly speaks more than one language, and that in different environments they're mixed up in different ways.

That. Auto-correction is just about impossible for me. I write in two or three languages, and sometimes mix them. In addition to that, the suggestions, even in the correct language, are always 100% wrong. Auto-correction has always, without exception, been in the way for me, so that one gets switched off first thing.

It's actually bliss to write Japanese.. even with my limited ability to do that. The only thing that pops up is suggestions for which kanji or whatever to use for what I entered. Works smoothly and fast.

> I have yet to encounter a predictive text system that handles more than one language well.

Huh, really?

I have "Multilingual typing" enabled in my Android keyboard settings and it works pretty well. I can write a message that has English, German and French mixed in (not even that uncommon in Switzerland...) and it doesn't have any problems with it.

In my experience suggestions also depend on the selected keyboard. When I type German on the English keyboad, autocorrect is terrible. I tried switching keyboards for a while but that did not work for me. The reason is that the placement of common letters (a to z) is subtly different between layouts and that skyrockets the error rate of my typing.

Does the iPhone not have an easy way to switch between keyboards? I just swipe left/right on the space bar to switch between Norwegian and English keyboards - but my phone isn't an iphone.

I has, but the issue is that the layout if the common keys (like letters a to z) is ever so slightly different that it wrecks my typing when I switch.

You can switch the layout in the keyboard setting. Most languages have a qwerty variant.

If you have several languages configured, there's a globe icon that lets you switch between keyboards. It's still a step down from Android that seems to just detect the language even if you switch mid-sentence.

If you don't mind the crashes, Gboard does this fine, generally detecting the difference between English, Spanish, and Portuguese for me. Although sometimes it wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and suggests only nonsense.

iOS autodetects and automatically switches languages as you described. The globe icon is just for switching key layouts. Language is independent of key layout.

> "Auto-Correction uses your keyboard dictionary to spellcheck words as you type, automatically correcting misspelled words for you." [1]

This is also consistent with my experience.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207525

If iOS has language detection like that, it's been broken for Finnish for years.

https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#quicktype-ke...

QuickType Keyboard: Multilingual Typing

English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and Hindi

Looks pretty half-assed implementation to me. If they have autocorrect for Finnish, it shouldn't be too difficult to do quick lookups for both Finnish and English. And everyone knows that it's Autocorrect's carefully designed brand image to screw up, switching languages would allow more creative mistakes.

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