Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I live in France, speak French, but work with English as my primary language.

So, I had to make the same settings change, otherwise google would keep putting French searches before English ones (despite the fact that I searched with English keywords).

I don't remember how I found this, but it might something along the lines of "I'm really annoyed today, let's fix this NOW". When you speak 2 languages or more, and they don't match with your location, Google, Microsoft, and most other big tech companies go completely nuts. So, you get used to fiddling with languages settings.

I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language.

PS: Speech recognition, autocorrect, and mobile keyboards : Same problem.

PS2: Apple get it right most of the time.



This is why I think Google assistant is absolutely useless. Try to call someone who has a name in X language on a device that is set to English. You just can't. I love Big tech circle jerk about diversity, that somehow stops at skincolor, gender and sexual identity. You happens to bilingual? Sorry our cutting edge AI can't handle that.

Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example "OK Google, Call *in german/dutch/French/etc* <after this command everything will be interpreted on the given language, for the rest of the voice input>. See, it's not that hard.


> Google all I want is a command for assistant, for example "OK Google, Call in german/dutch/French/etc <after this command everything will be interpreted on the given language, for the rest of the voice input>. See, it's not that hard.

I had the exact same idea, it seems Google really lack good product design.


> I have no idea how we got there, but my guess is that most Google engineers are either : completely ignorant of internationalization issues, don't care, or don't speak more than one language.

Funny, if anything probably 80%+ of the eng folks in Europe for big tech speak more than one language (everyone who's not from UK or Ireland).




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: