Bilingual dictation assistant Silvia understands ‘Spanglish’ and other language mixtures

Natural language AI assistants tend to be excellent English speakers, and passable in other tongues — but if you are one of the millions who fluidly switch between two languages on the fly, they’re stumped. A new AI helper called Silvia, however, understands “Spanglish” just fine, with more language combos to come.

The app — not a funded startup or anything like that — was created over the last month by Mansidak Singh, who during the day is a founding product engineer at re:collect AI.

“I met an Argentinian girl at a bar last month. During our conversation, she mentioned how her iPhone freaks out if you use a word in English while talking in Spanish,” Singh said. These assistants just aren’t flexible the way people’s brains are.

“For example, if you said, ‘Hey, vamos a cenar tonight? See you there!’ iOS would typically ignore the Spanish part if the English keyboard was enabled, or vice versa. This was not ideal for folks who speak in Spanglish. After talking to more folks in the LATAM community I realized this problem was more prevalent than I knew… so I solved it.”

Silvia is one of those little apps that pops up from the left side of your keyboard, so you just tap that instead of the native dictation icon. Then you’ll be able to speak in your favored mixture of languages, and it will type that right out for you. It supports only Spanish and English at first, but with French, Romanian, Ukrainian, German, and Dutch coming soon. There will also be a custom keyboard version so you can use it in non-Apple apps.

I asked whether we’d see a version for Hindi and English, another common mixture, but Singh said that, for now, the approach only works for Germanic languages that use the Roman alphabet.

Curious how he built it so quickly? Well, he’s already an engineer working in this space, of course, but really, the APIs are pretty strong here and he has deployed them 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 do cleaning up, hence it works lightning fast,” he explained.

It doesn’t store any data, by the way, so don’t worry that this is some kind of shady play. It’s Apple-approved.

Unlike pretty much every other AI product out there, this one doesn’t claim to change the world — just reflect it a little more accurately. You’ll be able to download Silvia at the end of the month here, or sign up to get notified when it’s out if you’re forgetful, like me.