Product of the week: AI Silvia understands ‘Spanglish’

AI assistants that are natural language learners typically speak English quite well and can converse in other languages, but they cannot help you if you are one of the millions of people who can switch between languages effortlessly.

However, a recent AI assistant named Silvia is quite proficient in “Spanglish,” and more language combinations are on the horizon.

The app was developed over the course of the last month by Mansidak Singh, a founding product engineer at re:collect AI.

“I met an Argentinian girl at a bar last month. During our conversation, she mentioned how her iPhone freaks out if you use a word in English while talking in Spanish. These assistants just aren’t flexible the way people’s brains are, Singh said, TechCrunch reported.

“For example, if you said, ‘Hey, vamos a cenar tonight? See you there!’ iOS would typically ignore the Spanish part if the English keyboard was enabled, or vice versa. This was not ideal for folks who speak in Spanglish. After talking to more folks in the LATAM community I realized this problem was more prevalent than I knew…so I solved it,” Singh added.

Silvia is one of those tiny applications that appears from the left side of the keyboard, so one can simply tap instead of the native dictation icon. It will then translate that for you so that you can speak in the preferred combination of languages.

English and Spanish are the only languages it supports as of now; French, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, and Dutch will be added shortly. It will also be compatible with non-Apple apps thanks to a customized keyboard version.