Back in 2012 we noted that Apple was hiring engineers
to help localize Siri into a number of languages the feature does not yet support. Those included Arabic, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and Danish, and recently Apple has added job listings for three more languages: Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Thai. Apple also posted more recent job listings for the languages it first started hiring for back in 2012.
While Apple didn’t announce any new languages for Siri coming in iOS 8 when it previewed the new operating system earlier this month, it’s always a possibility languages could be added in time for its release this fall.
Apple is yet to add support for the languages mentioned above that it started hiring for a couple years back. Currently, Apple lists the following languages and localizations as supported by Siri:
- United States (English, Spanish)
- United Kingdom (English)
- Australia (English)
- France (French)
- Germany (German)
- Japan (Japanese)
- Canada (English, Canadian French)
- China (Mandarin)
- Hong Kong (Cantonese)
- Italy (Italian)
- Korea (Korean)
- Mexico (Spanish)
- Spain (Spanish)
- Switzerland (Italian, French, German)
- Taiwan (Mandarin)
While not Siri support, Apple will be adding 24 new languages to its dictation feature in iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite including Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Portuguese and some of the other new languages it has been hiring engineers for recently.
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Think Apple would fix the English version before all these other languages.
Portuguese would be a dream come true!
Portuguese is a really hard language to understand programmatically. Brazilian Portuguese is not one language and more than English is one language. Which is why Siri has british, australian, american, canadian, etc. In Brazil the accents vary a lot from the northeast, to southeast to south, so they would need to create at least 3 versions, if not more.
And then there’s the fact that Brazilians don’t fully pronounce their words in the way they are written.
Where are you = Onde voce esta? But many people would instead say Onji ce ta? Leaving out several syllables. So there’s a spoken language and a written language and it’s hard to speak in the same way as the written language, it feels artificial.
My guess is that even though apple may support it, it’ll be a very poor implementation that will fail to understand a lot of people and will require people to speak in very artificial ways in order to be understood.
I am from Portugal, so I would require one more version ;)
I’m assuming you’re coming from looking at Portuguese from the Spanish language point of view judging by your last name (my first language is Spanish so I know what you’re saying). I must say I started doing the same thing and felt that to some extent, Portuguese felt like an almost incomplete version of Castellano, but we are wrong when doing this. It just has a different structure and word endings and meanings coming from the Latin roots shared with the other European languages is all. With regards to accents, we wouldn’t need so many different versions within Brazil. Imagine here in the US with the southern accent, New york (italian, new yorikans, etc), african american accents, and OH the slangs in the US! and Siri can still handle those to some extent, and yet there is only the option for American. Your point about the letters not pronounced in portuguese, one question: Have you even looked at English? And French? For god’s sake! They even have a French version and WAY too many words are pronounced the same and written completely differently in French AND English!!! Portuguese IS doable, Apple just didn’t have interest to do it until higher demand sparked in those countries with it. And perhaps the fact that since Portuguese is not an official United Nations language might have contributed to the delayed adoption although Japanese was available before not being an official UN language, and now THAT is a challenging language.
Portuguese version would be great. I speak Portuguese as well.
We are waiting for Português – BR since 2012!