With the launch of Apple Intelligence, the Cupertino company has once again given its Spanish-speaking audience a dose of reality, reminding them that, despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, they will continue to be second-class users.
What are Apple’s motivations for always delaying its Spanish language releases? We are not sure, but this is just the latest in a historical series of disdains towards the language we speak.
It was during this year’s WWDC 2024 when Apple finally revealed both its Artificial Intelligence and the collaboration with ChatGPT as a supplier for those issues in which its own would still be very green. If you were watching the Keynote live with us, as well as the subsequent analysis we did in the #PodcastApple weekly, you will know that it did not surprise us, in fact, We expected Apple not to launch its Artificial Intelligence in Spanish
While it is true that this functionality is in beta phase until the last quarter of 2024, where it will debut together with iOS 18, for the moment it will only be available in English in the United States of America until further notice. What’s more, without making express mention of Spanish, Apple warns that we will not see new languages until well into 2025, that is, Spanish-speaking users who purchase an iPhone 16 may never use Apple Intelligence, or at least until the launch of the iPhone 17.
A bit of context
Let’s focus on the native language. In this sense, Spanish is the Romance language with the greatest reach, as it is spoken in Spain, Latin America and Equatorial Guinea, and even in some countries it is the second most spoken language, as is the case in the United States of America, Philippines or Morocco. In figures, Spanish has 480 million native speakers.
However, well It is true that English has only 380 million native speakers, Meanwhile, the enormous efforts of the English and especially the Americans, as well as their marketing policies imposed by numerous companies, have turned English into the most “used” language, or at least the one with the greatest international reach.
How can a company like Apple ignore the language used by more than 60 million of Americans? The truth is that I don’t really understand it either, but it is a fairly common trend at Apple, which, however, It rarely misses an opportunity to present itself as an inclusive, progressive and, above all, accessible company.
According to predictions, the United States of America, the home of Apple, sIn 2060, it will be the second country in the world with the most Spanish speakers, just behind Mexico, which has 127 million people who communicate in Spanish. Anyone who has walked around Los Angeles, San Francisco or even Cupertino will know that Spanish is everywhere. I myself was served with great pleasure and with excellent professionalism in impeccable Spanish at the Apple Visitors Center.
Examples of other AI
It is well known that ChatGPT speaks Spanish, or at least it tries quite well. For its part, Microsoft launched Bing Chat publicly in May 2023, a system that worked perfectly in Spanish.
For its part, Google launched Bard on February 6, 2023, just a month later, on March 21, it was already opening it to Spanish (and 40 other languages) through a waiting list system, and just 5 months later, Bard was already completely free and available to Spanish-speaking users.
So if Apple has come to this Artificial Intelligence thing a year late, Why is the Spanish language operation being postponed? Well, we don’t know either.
Apple’s extensive list of snubs
Siri officially arrived in 2011, as a feature exclusive to the iPhone 4s. The original (not so different from the current one) version of Apple’s virtual assistant was capable of offering conversational interaction with different applications such as Reminders, as well as informing us about the weather, sending emails and even playing music. So, in November 2011, the first analysts realized that Siri only spoke English, in three variants: English from the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States of America.
It was not until late 2012 that Apple began to understand the second most spoken language in the country where it was born, with iOS 6.
As you know, visionOS was launched without a keyboard, and later received a small update to make it visible. However, even though adding characters to a QWERTY keyboard doesn’t seem very difficult, the reality is that the virtual keyboard of visionOS It was released for French, Korean, Chinese, German and… variants, once again, no trace of Spanish.
How many Spanish speakers can there be on Apple’s development team? It seems that no one feels the slightest bit of national pride at this disdain, at least not enough to raise their hand and tell their Project Manager that a Spanish keyboard would be used by hundreds of millions more users than the German version.
Why Apple?
I do not really know. It’s like Apple Pay Cash and the Apple Card, a kind of financial product that never ends up arriving in Spain despite the fact that, following Apple’s guidelines, certain media outlets insist on reminding us periodically with a promise of launch that never comes, the last one just three days ago.
I do not believe that these movements have their origin in a racial, ethnic or imperialist conflict, but rather it is one more example of the “Pormishuevism” that Apple typically performs in the course of its duties.
Meanwhile, We will continue to wait for Artificial Intelligence to be able to speak the language in which Don Quixote de la Mancha was written, the one spoken by Picasso, Dalí, Velázquez, Goya, Diego Rivera and many others. You’ll allow me to dispense with Bad Bunny and company, I plead guilty, I’m too much of a “millennial” for that. And now I’ll say goodbye in a way that Apple Intelligence can understand: Goodbye.
Source: www.actualidadiphone.com
