[mavamaarten]

I personally haven't found any keyboard that works better than gboard. And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.

[kergonath]

From my experience it is much worse than it used to be 5 years ago. I have been writing English, French, and to a lesser extent German on an iPhone since ~2008. Initially, the dumb autocorrect would just correct to the closer word in the dictionary corresponding to the current keyboard, but over time it would pick up more and more words I used regularly. At some point around 2018 or so, it was nearly flawless. I think it changed the dictionary depending on the language or the sentence, because I had different suggestions for the same mistyped word in the same document. Also, I assume that by then my personal dictionary was quite extensive.

And then they bragged about a new machine-learning improved keyboard and it went downhill. First, all keyboards became monolingual, which was a 10-years regression. And even in that language, it was very flakey. They added multi-language keyboards somewhat recently and it got slightly better, except that for some reason it changes the keyboard back to the English-only one regularly for no reason I can see.

It is maddening. For a couple of years it was fantastic.

[noname120]

And that’s not the worst. On the Apple Watch not only is the multilingual keyboard completely broken, but worse than that: if you change the language of the keyboard by long pressing the space button it shows the new language, but the autocorrect proceeds to just ignore it completely and autocorrects everything as if I were typing in the system language rather than the one I selected.

And contrary to the iPhone you can’t even disable autocorrect! This + the super-aggressive autocorrect of watchOS (the screen is small after all so you are likely to make a mistake and we better fix it automatically!) makes it an absolute NIGHTMARE to type on an Apple Watch in multiple languages. Your only option is to use speech to type because that one for some reason works when you change the language whereas the keyboard doesn’t care.

Edit: the language switch bug on watchOS seems to have finally been fixed on watchOS 26.1. The bug was already long present on watchOS 11, so not something that watchOS 26 introduced.

[whycome]

This scarily aligns with my experience. 2018 was the golden age for keyboards for whatever reason.

[rockinghigh]

Completely agreed. Apple seriously regressed the multi-lingual experience. They probably have a model per language. If you have to mix languages in a sentence, well, good luck!

[cyberrock]

I just want to talk to the folks who made the language switching logic so complicated instead of just a constant rotation like desktop IMEs. It seems like they expect the user to remember the previous language or prioritize languages in a clear order, but did it not occur to them that I might switch languages chaotically (A->C->D->B), keep it there, then hours later when I forgot what $previousLanguage was and press switch, I might as well be spinning a roulette?

[chimeracoder]

> And exactly because it's the only keyboard that just lets me type in two languages without having to "switch", and it does that well. Right now my spacebar just says "NL - EN" and it lets me combine Dutch and English just fine.

I can't stand keyboards that do this - especially those that don't let you turn it off. If you write in another language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet, you end up with nonsense suggestions - common English words like "the" or "and" will get replaced with obscure words in another language that just happen to sound vaguely phonetically similar. I almost never switch languages mid-sentence when typing, and yet the keyboard can't seem to grasp that.

[batrat]

This. I use romanian, english and turkish at the same time. Sometimes goes sideways because we mix a lot of words in english and romaninan in the same sentence, but it's ok. No other keyboard comes close.

[parliament32]

Multilingual typing is a godsend. I did have to tweak settings though, like disabling the "suggestion strip" (because sometimes I'd be typing fast and accidently click the GIF button, then an image, which in many apps sends it immediately without a draft which was extremely annoying).

[Mashimo]

I use 3 languages with SwiftKey and it works really well.

That said, it got bought by Microsoft and now they try to cram in some AI nonsense :(