Google released a keyboard app for the iPhone some months back called Gboard, and everyone was wondering if it would come to Android. Well, now it has as the v6.0 update to Google Keyboard. It’s not only a name change, though. There are a few important new features, including a search shortcut and true multi-language support.
Finally – finally – Google adds true multi-language support to the official Android keyboard. iOS added this in – I believe – iOS 10. Are the sheltered men of Silicon Valley finally realising vast numbers of people live multilingual lives on a daily basis and that technology is woefully ill-equipped to deal with that fact?
We’ll know for sure once things like Wear and the Apple Watch no longer require full wipes and resets just to switch input languages.
On Android you have always been able to use alternative keyboards if you needed that.
Btw. I think BlackBerry did it first years before iOS, and still did it best.
I don’t think he means writing each separate communication in a separate language, but rather mixing them.
E.g. with my friends and family we code switch a mixture of English, Spanish and Italian. With the previous keyboard (which only allows one language set at a time), that could potentially mean in the space of a single sentence having to change the keyboard language option 6-8 times,or running the risk of having what I’m writing “corrected” to a different word in the currently set language.
I haven’t updated my phone’s keyboard yet but if this really allows having several languages set *at the same time* (rather than just one at a time), it’ll really make typing a hell of a lot more pleasant for me and the millions of other code switchers.
<a href=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching“>Code-switching<….
Edited 2016-12-13 14:06 UTC
The default iOS UK English keyboard is very frustrating… We have almost every Polish letter, except for “Ä…” (“a” with a tail.) But it has “żźćśłęń”… this makes no sense to me, but hey – Californian logic rarely does.
That is what I meant too. There are a number of virtual keyboards that do that. Though the best implementation I saw was the virtual keyboard on the BB Q10.
I gave up on SwiftKey though which is the most common Android keyboard with that feature, because it kept capitalizing i, which would be incorrect all the time in every language other than English.
Edited 2016-12-13 16:56 UTC
Multilingual World [which is huge], and Thom’s Translational Entrepreneurship, specifically
Could The New Universal Font Be Related to this Notice?
My (Android) BlackBerry Priv has had this since one of its first updates after release, about a year ago. Predictive text and special characters combined. Did I mention it has a physical keyboard? Shame nobody else owns it but me and the other three people. I believe the BlackBerry Keyboard can be downloaded from the Play Store. Even without a PKB it’s deeee-eee-ecent.
There was some multi-language support (no language switching necessary) for a short while in the past (for a subset of users, probably). It wasn’t very good (even if it was an improvement for me over the default mode), which I suppose is the reason why they withdrew it.
This new version is the real deal: sometimes it misinterprets the language of the current word, but picks it up with the next – and corrects both (underlining them so you see more clearly what changed).