Do you find yourself switching off your predictive keyboard on your phone when you are texting someone in Maltese?
You do not have to do so any more, as a free app has been developed to predict your messages in Maltese… and it sometimes manages to predict a whole sentence.
And once downloaded, you can even write in both Maltese and English, as many do.
SwiftKey, a London-based start-up recently acquired by Microsoft, makes predictive keyboard for Android devices, and is used by over 40 million users.
“We support over 120 languages, so it’s a bit of a mystery how Maltese managed to escape until now. We follow user requests and, over the years, enough people requested that we add Maltese support, so we did,” Julien Baley, a software engineer for the company said.
Asked how difficult it was to get the necessary resources, Mr Baley, who has been with the company for almost five years and has worked on over 30 languages, said it was “surprisingly easy”.
We support over 120 languages,so it’s a bit of a mystery how Maltese managed to escape until now
“Maltese has a lot of easily accessible resources for us to make a predictive keyboard. For a speaking population of half a million people, that’s really unusual,” he said, adding that through the process he was also helped out by Lincoln Grixti, a SwiftKey user.
University lecturer at the Maltese Department Michael Spagnol, who uses the app, said it not only sped up writing but also predicted whole expressions and common phrases. For instance, if one types grazzi, the keyboard predicts ħafna and għal, two words which typically follow grazzi. Similarly, if you type il-ġimgħa, the predictor suggests li għaddiet and d-dieħla.
Dr Spagnol believes it is a good tool for those unsure of the spelling of a particular word, however for the time being, some uncommon or infrequent words might be spelled incorrectly, while in a few cases, the keyboard omits the dot on the ċ, ġ, ż, and the stroke on the ħ.
This is probably because some words, like qiegħda and imġiba are often written incorrectly, that is, as qegħda and imġieba, so the keyboard gives both options.
“Needless to say, it is also very helpful for those with dyslexia where recognising a correctly spelt word offered by the predictor can be easier than thinking how to spell it in the first place,” Dr Spagnol noted.
Asked about incorrect spellings, Mr Baley said the company welcomed feedback to fix such problems.
When contacted, senior lecturer and director of the Institute of Linguistics Albert Gatt said it took a while for Maltese to start being supported as these systems worked by generating predictions using statistical models, and such models were built using large quantities of linguistic data.
He believes the main bottleneck for “small” languages is that it takes a while for the data to become available in sufficient quantities.
Meanwhile, there are also the commercial dynamics.
“SwiftKey has become something of a de facto go-to app, and earlier this year was bought by Microsoft, an indicator of its success. As such apps become more widespread, demand for new services begins to grow.”
But it is difficult to predict whether there will be as much of a need for predictive typing on computer keyboards. Predictive typing is useful on phones, where space is limited, but on computers, people usually have room to be more expressive and verbose as well.
People can download the SwiftKey Keyboard for free on their Android phone from the Google Play store, and then choose Maltese as their preferred language.