Natural language AI assistants are generally good at English and other languages, but if you’re one of the millions who can switch between the two languages on the fly, you might be surprised. But a new AI assistant called Silvia understands “Spanglish” quite well, and more language pairs are coming soon.
This app is not a funded startup, nor is it anything like that. It was created last month by Mansidak Singh, who is currently a founding product engineer at re:collect AI.
“I met an Argentine woman at a bar last month, and during our conversation she said that her iPhone behaves strangely when she uses English words while speaking Spanish,” Singh said. These assistants are not as flexible as human brains.
“For example, if you say ‘Hey, vamos a cenar tonight? See you there!’, iOS would usually ignore the Spanish part if the English keyboard was active, and vice versa. This wasn’t ideal for people who use Spanglish. After talking to more people in the LATAM community, I realized this issue was more widespread than I knew… so I fixed it.”
Silvia is one of those little apps that pops out on the left side of your keyboard, and you just tap it instead of the default dictation icon. You can then speak in your preferred language combination and it will type it for you. It will initially only support Spanish and English, but will soon support French, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, and Dutch. There is also a custom keyboard version for use in non-Apple apps.
I asked if we could see versions for Hindi and English (another common mixed language), but Singh said that for now this approach only works for Germanic languages that use the Roman alphabet.
Are you wondering how he made it so fast? Well, he’s already an engineer working in this field, but the truth is, the API here is pretty powerful and he’s laid them out cleverly.
“I’m currently using the new translation API in iOS 18 to create two mono channels for Spanish and English, and then using OpenAI Whisper in parallel to clean it up, so it works very quickly,” he explained.
By the way, it doesn’t store any data, so don’t worry if this is some kind of shady prank. It’s Apple-approved.
Unlike all other AI products, this one doesn’t claim to change the world. It just reflects it a little more accurately. You can download Silvia here later this month, or if you’re forgetful like me, you can sign up to be notified when it’s released.
