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Comment by yunohn | Hacker News Reader

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…

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.

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.

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