7 ms·

My biggest gripe with smart keyboards is that it doesn't work well for multiple languages. I speak three that uses the english alphabet, and the keyboards get

by yelnatz 13y ago

My biggest gripe with smart keyboards is that it doesn't work well for multiple languages. I speak three that uses the english alphabet, and the keyboards get annoying when it starts predicting english words when I'm typing something in a different language altogether. Most of the time I even disable the dictionary on normal keyboards.

thomasahle 13y ago
I run Danish, English and Spanish on Swifthkey, and it works very well. As soon as I have typed one or two words, it knows exactly what language I'm typing.
- slazaro 13y ago
  But they're very different languages that share very few words, aren't they? Try speaking a few romanic languages that share a bigger proportion of their words and you'll see where the problem is.
  - Uberphallus 13y ago
    Example root: liber- Fr: liberté, libertés, libérer... Sp: libertad, libertades, liberar... Pt: liberdade, liberdades, liberar... For a 2-3 word completion choice it's useless.
ebiester 13y ago
Not to mention that often, we'll use words in multiple languages in the same text (or email, or note...)
Pxtl 13y ago
I find the exact opposite problem on my old WinPhone - since I'm Canadian, I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. And unlike the letter-keys, there is no autocorrect for this status-toggle. So I accidentally hit the "ENU/FRC" toggle when I meant to hit N and suddenly the autocorrect is turning my words into French. I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school.
- Someone 13y ago
  "I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. [...] I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school" So, which is it? Should I read "must need" as "Microsoft assumes I need two layouts?" Isn't is possible to disable the French keyboard on the phone?
- rahimnathwani 13y ago
  Would selecting US-English as your language preference fix this?
  - slaman 13y ago
    But then we'd be spelling things like colour incorrectly!
frandroid 13y ago
Swype is getting better at this, you can type in English + [language of your choice]. Predictably, its guess become less precise because now it has to choose from a data set twice as large, but one can swap between setups...
crazygringo 13y ago
I came here to say the same thing. I have friends I text in a mixture of English and Portuguese, and just my simple iPhone keyboard drives me nuts. I don't want to have to cycle through the language button on every other word. And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time.
- GuiA 13y ago
  > And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time. It is a terrible design flaw, that is primarily due to the fact that a lot of software designers assume that the average person speaks one language; in fact there are more multilingual people than monolingual people in the world (cf first paragraph of [0]). Ideally, software keyboards would be designed to take that fact into account - a few smart things could be done! But no, a lot of software is designed by upper middle class westerners which tend to only speak a single language, and the designs we have are victims of their creators' biases. In the meantime, I have 5 different keyboards on my iPhone, and I find texting extremely painful. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism
  - spaky 13y ago
    I completely agree that as software makers, keyboard makers in particular, we have to be understand how prevalent and important multilingualism is. ASCII and the subsequent long road to Unicode is a fantastic example of this western centric bias. The Minuum team includes a number of multilingual people; I mix french and english on a daily basis, others on the team speak slavic languages regularly. Similarly being based in Toronto, near the bilingual province of Quebec, our friends and family early user network included many multilingual people. I think that more than almost any other type of software designers, keyboard makers are acutely aware of the importance and the myriad of issues surrounding multilingual support. We've known since very early on that language support is a major factor that will eventually make or break us. For us, each new language actually brings a surprising number of exciting new technical challenges. Hopefully we'll be able to gain insights from the process and find those "few smart things" that can be done to get you from 5 keyboards to 1.
wxs 13y ago
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.
- yelnatz 13y ago
  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.
  - wxs 13y ago
    We do have English, German French, Spanish, and Italian now actually, but the experience of switching between them could be improved.
    - CodeMunky 13y ago
      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.
    - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
      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.
jadyoyster 13y ago
I regularly type in multiple languages, and SwiftKey has been amazing at this on my Android phone. I can highly recommend it to anyone.
- cageface 13y ago
  SwiftKey is amazing. Almost reason enough alone to prefer an Android phone over other options.
Tloewald 13y ago
They are equally borked for typing names, addresses, text messages, shell commands, numbers...
apunic 13y ago
Did you try Kii, Swiftkey or TouchPal X? They all allow to mix multiple languages and are pretty awesome virtual keyboards. Using them with two or more languages at the same time is a very smooth experience. Couldn't imagine to go back to a single language keyboard. A quick overview: - Swiftkey has probably the best prediction capabilities and with its cloud sync it has many advanced features. - Touchpad is very close to swiftkey - Kii is the keyboard with the most configuration possibilities. You can change really everything with this keyboard, from the size of the buttons over padding, click sounds, prediction behaviors to gestures and many, many more. It's definitely the most powerful and fastest keyboard. On par with swiftkey except the cloud sync feature. Once you you set it up to your needs your type as fast as with a blackberry either with one hand (by swiping) or with two hands (by tapping). But again swiftkey and touchpad are very powerful too and at the end it's a matter of taste. Swype is still quite popular but doesn't have good multi language support and the experience is not that smooth compared to the other ones.
- Uberphallus 13y ago
  I don't know about Kii (seemed pretty bad long time ago) nor TouchPal X, but although I love SwiftKey, I hate its model. I'm almost positive they use an n-gram Markov model, which is pretty cool. But, and the big but (might be wrong but it's my feeling) is that they share the model across languages. I suspect so because I normally keep English/Spanish on and switch between Portuguese and French, and even when I'm writing Spanish in E/S/F mode I get Portuguese suggestions (because of identical and very similar words to Spanish). No, you should be way, way stricter to tell languages apart and use different models for each one, probably using another model to adjust the probability of each language. Example annoyance: After I type 3 words in Spanish that happen to be 2 words in Portuguese and 1 in English, I certainly don't want the English suggestion, even if I use that word more frequently in English.
- xerophtye 13y ago
  I haven't tried it, but do answer this. does it support only pre-defined languages? What if my language isn't based on the roman alphabet, but i use them phonetically. Does it support that?
xerophtye 13y ago
Well android's default keyboard learns it pretty well. Not only does it learn words, but also their usage by observing patterns in sentences. One time i had to type a fb comment 3 times because the sending kept failing . On the third time, the keyboard was predicting entire words of the sentence, sometimes even before i wrote a single letter!

by yelnatz 13y ago

thomasahle 13y ago

I run Danish, English and Spanish on Swifthkey, and it works very well. As soon as I have typed one or two words, it knows exactly what language I'm typing.

slazaro 13y ago
But they're very different languages that share very few words, aren't they? Try speaking a few romanic languages that share a bigger proportion of their words and you'll see where the problem is.
- Uberphallus 13y ago
  Example root: liber- Fr: liberté, libertés, libérer... Sp: libertad, libertades, liberar... Pt: liberdade, liberdades, liberar... For a 2-3 word completion choice it's useless.

ebiester 13y ago

Not to mention that often, we'll use words in multiple languages in the same text (or email, or note...)

Pxtl 13y ago

I find the exact opposite problem on my old WinPhone - since I'm Canadian, I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. And unlike the letter-keys, there is no autocorrect for this status-toggle. So I accidentally hit the "ENU/FRC" toggle when I meant to hit N and suddenly the autocorrect is turning my words into French. I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school.

Someone 13y ago
"I automatically must need the language-switcher button on my keyboard so that I can switch to french. [...] I haven't written or typed a word of French since high-school" So, which is it? Should I read "must need" as "Microsoft assumes I need two layouts?" Isn't is possible to disable the French keyboard on the phone?
rahimnathwani 13y ago
Would selecting US-English as your language preference fix this?
- slaman 13y ago
  But then we'd be spelling things like colour incorrectly!

frandroid 13y ago

Swype is getting better at this, you can type in English + [language of your choice]. Predictably, its guess become less precise because now it has to choose from a data set twice as large, but one can swap between setups...

crazygringo 13y ago

I came here to say the same thing. I have friends I text in a mixture of English and Portuguese, and just my simple iPhone keyboard drives me nuts. I don't want to have to cycle through the language button on every other word. And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time.

GuiA 13y ago
> And I think that's the experience for a lot of people who live in a foreign country, or still have friends from other countries. Languages get mixed all the time. It is a terrible design flaw, that is primarily due to the fact that a lot of software designers assume that the average person speaks one language; in fact there are more multilingual people than monolingual people in the world (cf first paragraph of [0]). Ideally, software keyboards would be designed to take that fact into account - a few smart things could be done! But no, a lot of software is designed by upper middle class westerners which tend to only speak a single language, and the designs we have are victims of their creators' biases. In the meantime, I have 5 different keyboards on my iPhone, and I find texting extremely painful. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingualism
- spaky 13y ago
  I completely agree that as software makers, keyboard makers in particular, we have to be understand how prevalent and important multilingualism is. ASCII and the subsequent long road to Unicode is a fantastic example of this western centric bias. The Minuum team includes a number of multilingual people; I mix french and english on a daily basis, others on the team speak slavic languages regularly. Similarly being based in Toronto, near the bilingual province of Quebec, our friends and family early user network included many multilingual people. I think that more than almost any other type of software designers, keyboard makers are acutely aware of the importance and the myriad of issues surrounding multilingual support. We've known since very early on that language support is a major factor that will eventually make or break us. For us, each new language actually brings a surprising number of exciting new technical challenges. Hopefully we'll be able to gain insights from the process and find those "few smart things" that can be done to get you from 5 keyboards to 1.

wxs 13y ago

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.

yelnatz 13y ago
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.
- wxs 13y ago
  We do have English, German French, Spanish, and Italian now actually, but the experience of switching between them could be improved.
  - CodeMunky 13y ago
    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.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    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.

jadyoyster 13y ago

I regularly type in multiple languages, and SwiftKey has been amazing at this on my Android phone. I can highly recommend it to anyone.

cageface 13y ago
SwiftKey is amazing. Almost reason enough alone to prefer an Android phone over other options.

Tloewald 13y ago

They are equally borked for typing names, addresses, text messages, shell commands, numbers...

apunic 13y ago

Did you try Kii, Swiftkey or TouchPal X? They all allow to mix multiple languages and are pretty awesome virtual keyboards. Using them with two or more languages at the same time is a very smooth experience. Couldn't imagine to go back to a single language keyboard. A quick overview: - Swiftkey has probably the best prediction capabilities and with its cloud sync it has many advanced features. - Touchpad is very close to swiftkey - Kii is the keyboard with the most configuration possibilities. You can change really everything with this keyboard, from the size of the buttons over padding, click sounds, prediction behaviors to gestures and many, many more. It's definitely the most powerful and fastest keyboard. On par with swiftkey except the cloud sync feature. Once you you set it up to your needs your type as fast as with a blackberry either with one hand (by swiping) or with two hands (by tapping). But again swiftkey and touchpad are very powerful too and at the end it's a matter of taste. Swype is still quite popular but doesn't have good multi language support and the experience is not that smooth compared to the other ones.

Uberphallus 13y ago
I don't know about Kii (seemed pretty bad long time ago) nor TouchPal X, but although I love SwiftKey, I hate its model. I'm almost positive they use an n-gram Markov model, which is pretty cool. But, and the big but (might be wrong but it's my feeling) is that they share the model across languages. I suspect so because I normally keep English/Spanish on and switch between Portuguese and French, and even when I'm writing Spanish in E/S/F mode I get Portuguese suggestions (because of identical and very similar words to Spanish). No, you should be way, way stricter to tell languages apart and use different models for each one, probably using another model to adjust the probability of each language. Example annoyance: After I type 3 words in Spanish that happen to be 2 words in Portuguese and 1 in English, I certainly don't want the English suggestion, even if I use that word more frequently in English.
xerophtye 13y ago
I haven't tried it, but do answer this. does it support only pre-defined languages? What if my language isn't based on the roman alphabet, but i use them phonetically. Does it support that?

xerophtye 13y ago

Well android's default keyboard learns it pretty well. Not only does it learn words, but also their usage by observing patterns in sentences. One time i had to type a fb comment 3 times because the sending kept failing . On the third time, the keyboard was predicting entire words of the sentence, sometimes even before i wrote a single letter!