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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile my language and dozens of others with hundreds of millions of speakers still don’t get the predictions at all, don’t support multi-language typing and don’t support swipe typing. Typing on a $1000 iPhone in one of these languages is still a 2007 experience.

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My biggest multilingual gripe on iOS is that highlighting text in, say, Czech and pressing Translate on the popup just tells you to fuck off.

Like, sure, don't support the language, but at least give me a Google Translate link then.

Same for Danish :(

Did you enable the Czech-English dictionary under Settings -> General -> Dictionary?

You can also add Czech as a language under Settings -> General -> Language & Region -> Add Language. This will let you switch your keyboard to Czech when typing and enable the language on websites and stuff. You can also switch the whole phone to Czech if you like, just by moving Czech to the top of the list of preferred languages.

For comparison, by simply using Gboard in iPhone you don’t need that and can type English and Czech in the same keyboard.

Same with SwiftKey, if for any reason you'd rather not have your keyboard from GOOGL.

I do have the keyboard enabled, but the long press translation feature is a separate thing.

They do this for cycling directions in Apple Maps too.

Come on Apple, you KNOW you don’t support cycling directions in Ireland - stop getting my hopes up every time I ask for directions. Just only show the button when you’re in a geo that supports the feature.

Even worse, on the Apple Watch you cannot input text at all in one of these languages, as you cannot (!) turn autocorrect off on the watch.

They managed to fit a full QWERTY keyboard on the screen yet made it completely useless.

The thing I find most interning is that typing (in English) on the microscopic Apple Watch keyboard seems to have better results than typing on my phone keyboard. I don’t know what the watch keyboard does differently but it seems to read my brain while my phone does the opposite.

Meanwhile, Microsoft managed to add Inuktitut to its products, despite only 30K speakers in the world.

I think the Czech government needs to intervene. I believe that's what happened with getting Welsh into Windows too?

Czech has around 10M speakers world wide. It sucks that they don't have solid predictions, but there are languages with massively more linguistic footprint that will end up prioritized.

Without putting too fine a point on it, I can tell you from direct experience that while it might seem that purely statistical methods are sufficient for predictive text, one of the problems is that you're building those models (whether using neural nets or pure stat models) from a body of text that is fraught with peril and the details matter.

There's really basic stuff like profanity and other offensive constructs (see all the jokes about google suggestion auto-complete where sexist, racist, and otherwise offensive suggestions get tons of attention), then there's the problem of source languages often having a clear shift in acceptable completions for entirely different reasons.

The euphemism treadmill in US English are an obvious and continuing expense, but consider whether USSR-era Czech texts, which are substantial, would be a safe bet in training a completion system.

Modern language processing relies on pretty large corpora, and to bootstrap it requires a part to be of high quality and annotated, although for spelling correction you don't need annotation. Or you can go the GPT-3 route and use really huge corpora. If that doesn't exist for your language, and for many smaller languages it doesn't, it won't get better than 2007.

Indonesian is spoken by 200M people (45M of which as first language), I bet they could find some text for it. When joined with the Malaysian family, it brings the total speakers to 290M.

My understanding is that the languages with better support have the advantage of official bodies that have section-by-section translations of all their documents; the EU into its 24 official languages and the UN with its six, for starters.

Building corpora has been an ongoing research activity since the 1990s. Many countries lacked the academic programs and support to build them. Often, the material isn't even there. E.g., wikipedia is a great source, but many "national" wikis are rather empty. The Bahasa wiki has 1/10th of the articles of the English one. They also seem to be shorter.

But also, Apple doesn't do much research. MS, however, has always had an active NLP research and support program, if only because of the importance of Word. But Apple depends on the research available from third parties.

I'm not sure about that. It doesn't require a huge corpus to learn the structural features of a language. If you have that plus an English dictionary for the language, an English language model should transfer pretty well to any language.

What language is it?

In my case it’s Czech, but it’s the same for many others, even much more common.

Well, maybe you're not the target group for this product and company and should buy one from the competition? Also tell it to your friends.

I don't think companies like Apple listen to anything but the numbers.

I’m an adult and I bought an iPhone knowing there are pros and cons. Some cons are more absurd than others and this is one of them. Otherwise I’m very happy with my Mini.

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