Add English keyboard

[andrewtavis]

Terms

• I have searched open new keyboard issues
• I agree to follow Scribe-iOS' Code of Conduct
• This issue is about one language, and I've changed the title to reflect this

What's needed

Adding an English keyboard to Scribe is as of now not a priority, but it will eventually be added, and could be worked on now if there's interest. There is as of now a good amount of data on Wikidata as can be seen in the queries. The English keyboard will be more of a focus for Scribe when the Translate feature is more developed (see project), and further when the Synonym feature is added.

What's needed:

• English language keyboard values added to InterfaceVariables.swift
• Fine tuning the WDQS queries found in Scribe-iOS/Data/English
• Writing formatting Python scripts and adding them to Scribe-iOS/Data/English
• Add English keyboard specific logic to KeyboardViewController.swift
• Setting up alternate key functions if there are keys that have them that aren't already implemented
• Adding a English directory to Scribe-iOS/Keyboards/LanguageKeyboards that includes all the formatted JSON data and an EnglishKeyboardViewController.swift file
• Adding all the formatted SQLite data to a Data directory in the new directory and updating the data table in the readme
• Add English keyboard specific logic to CommandVariables.swift

[muescha]

i would vote for an english keyboard - i think the most students are learning english and this keyboard would be helpful

[andrewtavis]

Thanks for your feedback, @muescha!

Yes I think that an English keyboard would help for irregular verbs. Issue is that we’re currently only translating from English to other languages. This issue needs to wait until at least #16 is finished as a user would need to be able to select a language to translate from, and then we could add the translation JSONs.

Any further feedback or support you’d like to provide would be very welcome! Again, thanks for reaching out! 😊

[andrewtavis]

• Issue is currently blocked by Add menu to Scribe app #16 as people need to be able to select which language they would translate from into English
• Add cross-language translation data Scribe-Data#23 also blocks this issue, as this will add the needed translation data to allow current languages to translate into English

[wkyoshida]

As mentioned in this discussion, I would be curious to hear thoughts on where the English keyboard now fits into the roadmap. I feel that the need is definitely there 🙏

[andrewtavis]

Glad to revisit this, @wkyoshida 😊

Big thing as I mentioned above is that we need to be able to choose which language to translate from. Listening to the interest here, I think it makes sense that we do something along the lines of translations being an option for any language pair that we can find a viable 🤗 Hugging Face model for. This would mean that we can do English to any of the seven languages as we do now, and then any of the seven languages to English. A translation JSON is roughly 2MB, so I don't think that this is preventative for adding any individual language pair. It's not a guarantee that there will be a valid translation model for each language pair, but even if we use a general one it should be ok. We can check the results, and worst comes to worst one translation pair isn't included.

Ultimately we'd need to edit the translation scripts in Scribe-Data to basically generate the translation files where the given language pair is no longer simply the target language from English, but that each of the seven models (we'd have eight total languages then) is ran and we get the resultant JSONs stored. We'd need to change the architecture here to check what the user has selected as a base language, with assigning the system language being a great baseline that they could then choose to switch from. If the default system language isn't offered, we’d choose English as the secondary default for each language, and I'd argue Spanish should be the secondary default base for English.

I think I can update the roadmap based on the above. The English keyboard would definitely come before data downloads :) Question is whether we think that this would qualify for v3.0, which to me it kind of does 😊

[andrewtavis]

Another thing we're hoping to do at some point, @wkyoshida, is to do a launch on Product Hunt. I think that as soon as we have the above translation pairs in place we'd be ready to make a splash 😊

[wkyoshida]

Gotchu! Thanks - I think that what you shared makes sense, @andrewtavis! 👍
I did notice as well the new issue created for the translation data, scribe-org/Scribe-Data#23.

Another thing we're hoping to do at some point, @wkyoshida, is to do a launch on Product Hunt. I think that as soon as we have the above translation pairs in place we'd be ready to make a splash 😊

Oh - I see! That would be pretty exciting 🙌 I just noticed it also has been in the outreach plans, #181

[andrewtavis]

96f32ab adds the directory for the eventual English keyboard :)

[wkyoshida]

I can't remember if this is something that we even considered, but could it be possible if we just add the English keyboard, although without a translation option for it?

This would make it the only keyboard without the feature unfortunately, but I'm wondering if the need/desire for English could justify this. The other keyboard features would still be beneficial to users I think. I'm just thinking about the issues that are blocking a complete English keyboard and scribe-org/Scribe-Data#23 seems it could potentially take some time to get completed. My guess, as well, is that the user desire for English is higher than that for Bokmål or Danish.

Something I was wondering recently. Let me know 🤷

[andrewtavis]

I totally agree that there's more need for English than there is for any other language :) I definitely do want to include a translate feature with it as well, but then I think that we can actually start on this pretty soon. My assumption is that #96 will be done soonish so long as the SQLite links are intuitive, and from there it's a data update away — one that will need me to check the process, but it'll be all of a couple hours max to make sure it's back to normal after #96. My hope is by the end of the week 😊

Something we could start on now is the WDQS queries and the Python formatting scripts above? Would you have an interest in looking at those, @wkyoshida?

[wkyoshida]

Something we could start on now is the WDQS queries and the Python formatting scripts above? Would you have an interest in looking at those, @wkyoshida?

I could give that a go 👍 unless though if we would like to loop it under as one of the items for @SaurabhJamadagni to take on as part of GSoC. We can talk through a plan for this on our call!

[andrewtavis]

I’d say so long as @SaurabhJamadagni does a keyboard it’s all good :) Doesn’t have to be this one, and we have #135 and #133 that would also be fine 😊 Let’s discuss!

[andrewtavis]

Closed by #484 :) Sooo looking forward to getting the translation process set and then getting this keyboard into the App Store! Thanks for all the hard work, @Jag-Marcel! 😊