With the launch of Apple Intelligence, the Cupertino company has once again reminded its Spanish-speaking audience of reality, reminding them that, despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it will continue to be a second language. class user.
What are Apple’s motivations for always delaying its Spanish launches? We are not clear, but this is nothing more than the latest in a historical series of contempt for the language we speak.
It was at this year’s WWDC 2024 that Apple finally revealed both its AI and the collaboration with ChatGPT as a supplier for problems in which its own would still be very green. If you watched the Keynote live with us, as well as the subsequent analysis we did in the #PodcastApple every week, you will know that this did not surprise us, in fact, We expected Apple not to launch its artificial intelligence in Spanish
While it is true that this feature is in beta until the last quarter of 2024, when it will debut with iOS 18, for the moment it will only be available in English in the United States of America until further notice. In addition, without expressly mentioning Spanish, Apple warns that we will not see new languages until 2025, that is, Spanish-speaking users who purchase an iPhone 16 will never be able to use Apple Intelligence, or at least until the iPhone 17 launches.
A bit of context
Let’s focus on the mother tongue. In this sense, Spanish is the most widely spoken Romance language, as it is spoken in USA, Latin America and Equatorial Guinea, and even in some countries it is the second most widely spoken language, as is the case in the United States of America. Philippines or Morocco. In numbers, Spanish has 480 million native speakers.
However, well It is true that English has only 380 million native speakers, while the enormous English and especially North American efforts, as well as their marketing policies imposed by many companies, have made English 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 Americans? The truth is that I don’t understand it very well either, but it’s a fairly common trend at Apple that, however, It usually does not miss the opportunity to present itself as an inclusive, progressive and above all accessible company.
The United States of America, Apple’s headquarters, is predicted to be the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by 2060, just behind Mexico, which is estimated to have 127 million people communicating in Spanish. Anyone who has visited Los Angeles, San Francisco or even Cupertino knows that Spanish is everywhere. I myself was welcomed with great pleasure and professionalism in impeccable Spanish at the Apple Visitors Center.
Examples of other AI
Everybody knows that ChatGPT speaks Spanish,
For its part, Google launched Bard on February 6, 2023, just a month later, on March 21, it already opened it to Spanish (and 40 other languages) through a waiting list system, and just 5 months later, Bard was already completely free and available for Spanish-speaking users.
So if Apple came to this AI problem a year late, Why are you postponing the operation in Spanish? Well, we don’t know that either.
Apple’s Long List of Contempt
Siri officially arrived in 2011, as an exclusive feature of the iPhone 4s. The original version (not so different from the current one) of Apple’s virtual assistant was able to offer conversational interaction with different applications such as Reminders, in addition to telling us the weather, sending emails and even playing music. Thus, in November 2011, the first analysts realized that Siri only spoke English, in three variants, namely: UK, Australian and US English.
It was only in late 2012 that Apple began to understand the second most spoken language of the country where it was born, thanks to iOS 6.
As you know, visionOS was launched without a keyboard, later receiving a small update that made it visible. However, even if adding characters to a QWERTY keyboard does not seem very difficult, the reality is that the virtual keyboard of visionOS It came out for variants of French, Korean, Chinese, German and… Again, no trace of Spanish.
How many Spanish speakers can there be on Apple’s development team? It seems that none of them feel any national pride in the face of this disdain, at least not enough to raise their hand and tell their project manager that perhaps a Spanish keyboard would be used by hundreds of millions more users than the others. German version.
Why Apple?
I do not really know. It’s like Apple Pay Cash and Apple Card, a type of financial product that never arrives in USA, although, following Apple’s guidelines, some media insist on reminding us of them periodically with a promise of a launch that never arrives, the last one being just three days ago.
I do not believe that these movements have their origins in a racial, ethnic or imperialist conflict, but rather that it is another example of the “Pormishuevism” that Apple usually performs in the performance of its duties.
During, 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’re going to allow me to do without Bad Bunny and company, I plead guilty, I’m too “millennial” for that. And now, I say goodbye to you in a way that Apple Intelligence understands me: Bye.
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