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Comment by lemming | Hacker News Reader

I really wish all the voice dictation/transcription had better language support. I'd really like to be able to say "Send a message to <my wife> in Spanish" and have it use Spanish dictation, and similarly to say "Read the last message in Spanish" when I'm using CarPlay. Perhaps at some point soon it will just get good enough that it'll detect which language is being used automatically, but right now it's pretty annoying for dual-language households.

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Most of Big Tech is sleeping on multilingual support, purely because the USA is still their primary revenue stream.

Someday, they’ll start focusing on the rest of the world and we’ll see real advancements in this space…

Most of USA doesn't speak English as their first language, isn't it?

What do you mean? Of course they do.

Yep, it baffles me too.

But as we can observe - Big Tech can totally ignore multilingual support and still make billions of dollars!

78.5% of Americans speak English at home:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_the_United_States

Easily the most intriguing mistake I've seen in months.

To this day I never bothered with speech reckognition, I am not going to talk to my devices in english, and understanding Portuguese, Spanish and German, never really works.

Multilingual support extends much further than just assistant speech recognition - translation and transliteration, keyboard input, media captioning are places where I find current OSes lacking.

But I’m surprised they’re still sleeping in this considering Apple expects it’s highest growth markets to be outside the English speaking part of the world

I think it’s less about revenue stream and more about dev’s languages. There are many tech companies who’s primary revenue stream is China, for example, but in those cases they still don’t need multilingual support nor even devs who speak Chinese.

Yeah. And the keyboard support for multi-languages is horrible, too. The prediction is nowadays so bad, I have to tiền it off or must use a single language only. Alone the notion that it should predict words in a different language than the current setting is baffling for me.

> The prediction is nowadays so bad, I have to tiền it off

This is great! I assume prediction gone wrong on "tiền". :)

It matches my experience as well, to the point that I also have it turned off.

Of course, I wanted to write “turn”, but the Apple keyboard was supposedly so smart, it had changed my word into something completely nonsensical

Overall smaller languages is abysmal. Microsoft translated Windows to my native language decades ago. MacOS still not translated. Nor iPhone. While Android phones come with translation out-of-box for most manufacturers UIs.

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