Meet Silvia: Your Bilingual Dictation Assistant Who Excels in Understanding ‘Spanglish’ and Language Blends

Natural language AI assistants excel at speaking English fluently and manage basic conversations in other languages. However, for the millions who effortlessly switch between languages in everyday discussions, these assistants often fall short. Enter Silvia, a groundbreaking AI helper designed to seamlessly understand "Spanglish," with plans to support even more language combinations in the future.

Silvia, developed over the past month by Mansidak Singh, is not a funded startup but rather an innovative project from his role as a founding product engineer at re:collect AI.

“I met an Argentinian girl at a bar last month, and she shared how her iPhone struggles when she mixes English with Spanish,” Singh recounted. The traditional AI assistants lack the adaptability that is second nature to human brains. "For instance, if you say, ‘Hey, vamos a cenar tonight? See you there!’ iOS typically ignores the Spanish words if the English keyboard is active, and vice versa. This creates challenges for those who communicate using Spanglish. After speaking with more people in the LATAM community, I realized that this was a widespread issue, so I took the initiative to solve it.”

Silvia appears as a small app on the left side of your keyboard, allowing you to tap it instead of the usual dictation icon. This feature lets you converse in your preferred blend of English and Spanish while seamlessly converting your speech to text. Initially, it will support only Spanish and English, but additional languages such as French, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, and Dutch will be added soon. A custom keyboard version is also in the works to enable usage in non-Apple applications.

When I inquired about a potential Hindi and English version, Singh mentioned that the current focus is on Germanic languages that utilize the Roman alphabet.

Wondering how he managed to develop this app so swiftly? As an experienced engineer in this domain, he’s leveraging robust APIs effectively. “I’m utilizing the new Translation API in iOS 18 to create two mono-channels for Spanish and English, in conjunction with OpenAI Whisper for rapid processing and cleanup,” he explained.

Rest assured, Silvia does not store any user data, making it a trustworthy and Apple-approved tool.

Unlike many other AI products that aim to revolutionize the world, this one simply aims to mirror reality more accurately. You can download Silvia at the end of this month or sign up for notifications if, like me, you have a tendency to forget.

AI, Apps, Silvia