AI-powered dictation assistant Silvia can speak Spanglish
A new AI assistant called Silvia, created by engineer Mansidak Singh, can understand and transcribe "Spanglish" and other language mixtures, addressing a common need among bilingual speakers and promising to expand to more language combinations in the future.
Natural language dictation systems are designed to handle a single language at a time, with performance degrading whenever one tries to add another language into the mix, as happens when English language dictation systems are faced with Spanglish. To address this issue, Mansidak Singh, a founding product engineer at re:collect AI, has developed an app called Silvia, a dictation system that leverages the power of AI to process and transcribe Spanglish, and eventually, other language mixes, starting with French, Romanian, German and Dutch.
The Silvia app is currently available in the Apple Store, integrating with the iOS keyboards in any app where users would normally use Apple's dictation system. The app, which was built with iOS 18's Translation API and OpenAI's Whisper, stores no data locally or in the cloud, and is Apple Store-vetted, which should vouch for its trustworthiness.
