A blog by Guillaume C. Marty

I recently worked on a way to automatise the creation of dictionaries for word suggestions when typing in Firefox OS (More on that one day, hopefully). As a test case, I generated a Welsh keyboard, as it is one of the few languages I know a little that didn’t have a keyboard in Firefox OS (Japanese keyboard is another exception though). Typing on a mobile is hard enough, so word suggestions and autocorrect are keys for a better experience. If you speak Welsh, even a little, and use Firefox OS on the master branch, please help us to test the keyboard and assess its quality.

Install and activate the Welsh keyboard

Make sure you are using the latest version of B2G. If your device is a Flame or a Sony Z3C running Firefox OS, then you should get new updates automatically. Otherwise, you’ll want to flash the latest version.

Here’s a quick demo of how to install it on your device.

Test the keyboard

The dictionary builtin in the keyboard is based on Wikipedia in Welsh, which has, I believe, a decent number of pages (around 64,000 articles, ranking it 64th biggest language out of 290).

From my experience, the results is very satisfying. I found the words suggested by this keyboard very useful. But my knowledge of Welsh is very limited, so it may not be completely helpful to a fluent speaker (or writer rather). In particular, I’m afraid that it may be too formal or lack slang or colloquial expressions, frequently used in SMS or social networks.

We need you!

If you speak Welsh, please, try it for yourself. I’d love to hear your feedback and if you have any comments, please use the field below, or reach me on Twitter at @g_marty. If this method is proved to give good results, I’d love to give it a go at producing dictionary in more languages.

Diolch!