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Comment by wxs | Hacker News Reader

My cofounder (spaky here) seems to be comment-limited on HN, but here are his thoughts on this:

I completely agree. I speak two languages regularly (English/French) and I also find it to be a pain point.

It's something that I hope we can address over time with Minuum. Certainly the first step will be making it really fast and painless to switch languages.

We've also considered having a quick way to disable auto-correction/disambiguation on the fly.

Do you have a favoured solution? Sounds like maybe simultaneous language support doesn't quite cut it for you.

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I don't really have a favoured solution, as of now, other than not using predictive typing.

I can see that Minuum works well using Bayes to predict a certain english word given the user input.

If you guys generate/use a language model for other languages that would give us around the same accuracy/prior probability as the english model, then I think it shouldn't be a problem.

Having quick settings and options that you can setup and choose which languages to include in the prior probability.

Being able to quickly turn off/turn a language, add/remove languages to the priori, etc.

We do have English, German French, Spanish, and Italian now actually, but the experience of switching between them could be improved.

This might not work at all but I wonder how it would work if you supplied it with a "mixed" language model. That is, a language model based around a person using multiple languages interchangably on the fly, simultaneously, instead of doing this modal switching stuff that causes so many headaches.

Given it's the name, I understand that one of the main objectives of your keyboard is to save space. However an option to simply stack two or three boards for those who could compromise screen space for multiple languages would be nice.

Switching languages does not work for me well. I type in 3 languages, two of them has accents. I usually type in different language than is set in the keyboard, because I forgot to set it. My phone keyboard (default on galaxy s3) has learned it well, so it is not problem. I have another recomendation:

Let user to check which languages he is using (somewhere in settings) and then allow him to use them as he wish. Mix all selected languages into one, previous (or two previous word) should be enough to predict correct next word.

disclaimer: I haven't used minuum yet, so I do not know if this is already possible.

I speak a few languages and often use words from other languages with SMSs etc. I'd estimate 90-95% of being english with other words thrown in between.

If I analyse my message history I will most likely find that I use less than 100-150 words from the other languages pretty often.

So, if there is a feature to quick way to disable auto-correction/disambiguation on the fly like you mentioned with an added feature to automatically add words that I use when auto-correct is turned off to a dictionary, my need to turn auto-correct off would decrease quite rapidly, to the point where I may not need it at all.

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