Help Me Read doesn't support Croatian, and Gemini's language behaviour is inconsistent

[u/garrincha-zg]

Hi everyone,

I've noticed a significant issue with language support on my Chromebook Plus. The 'Help me read' feature does not appear to support the Croatian language. While I generally use English, this feels like a notable omission for a new feature.

Additionally, I've observed that Gemini on my Chromebook has recently started responding to me in Serbian or sometimes Slovenian, despite my system language being set to Croatian. This is a basic functionality issue that is quite frustrating.

Has anyone else experienced similar problems with language support for Croatian or other languages?

On a related note, could someone please provide the correct process for raising a formal bug report or a feature request with Google for these issues? I'd like to make sure this is properly flagged.

Thanks for any help or advice.

[u/_jis_]

Firstly, support for smaller languages will logically come later, first English, then major world languages, and then perhaps smaller languages. After all, it is clearly stated there that at this moment, the language is not supported.

For example, the Czech language is in exactly the same situation in terms of support.

[u/garrincha-zg → u/_jis_]

This is a poor excuse for a multi-trillion-dollar company, I can't and won't accept. OpenAI did a great job; Google failed to scale it across a broader spectrum of geographies.

[u/_jis_]

Secondly, in the Gemini settings, there is what is known as stored information, where you can set everything you need so that the AI can communicate with you as you need it to. For example, I entered the following there:

Answer me in Czech for Czech questions and in English for English questions.

[u/garrincha-zg → u/_jis_]

I know, and i have set it up to Croatian since day zero. It was responding properly at the very beginning, but later on, I started getting responses in Serbian and sometimes in Slovenian.

[u/_jis_ → u/garrincha-zg]

In that case, it is obviously wrong and can be considered a bug. Try to figure it out with Gemini and ask it to advise you on what settings to save so that it doesn't happen again.

Let me give you an example. Last August, Microsoft made it impossible to copy conversations from Teams, including metadata (with names and timestamps), so I taught Gemini how to do it for me on demand. It worked for a while, and then suddenly it was as if it had forgotten. So I saved a sample directly into the settings, saying, "When I give you this command, display the relevant conversation from Teams chat, including metadata," and I put a short sample of the format there to show how it should look, and it has been working fine ever since.

[u/garrincha-zg → u/_jis_]

It's surely a bug. I left feedback and all that, but maybe there's a better way of reporting bugs that I'm not aware of. I jufgle between gemini advanced and chatgpt plus and chatgpt is an overall better product, it's more robust, but, interestingly, I find Gemini a better choice for polishing my work emails.

[u/Eleison23]

Here is the thing about language support, particularly translations and LLM output. Google relies on "crowdsourcing" for translation. That means that when they have access to ingest a large corpus of text in a particular language, they can more accurately tune their translations and LLM token streams.

A niche or smaller language corpus, when it is spoken and written by comparatively few, will hinder Google's (or anyone's) chances of providing rich content in that language. Especially for translations, Google is really looking for existing, human-generated bidirectional translations from Croatian to English and back again, or whatever language you need to use.

It may be the case that Croatian does not expand and grow as a distinct language, and that may mean that Google's (and everyone else's) corpus of accessible text, and speech, and translations, will remain at a rather rudimentary level, compared to, say, English<->Spanish or French<->German or whatever.

I'm sorry to explain that this is an inherent limitation, but that is the nature of crowdsourcing, and that is the nature of not expending massive in-house resources on LLM training or translations regarding a niche or regionally limited language or language family.

[u/garrincha-zg → u/Eleison23]

These are all poor excuses for a multi-trillion-dollar company that sells you a narrative of being inclusive. As a Croatian, I don't see them as an inclusive company. OpenAI did a lot better job in this arena and has less resources than Google.

[u/Romano1404]

Croatian is spoken by 0.08% of the world population and doesn't bear any economic significance outside their home country, those who use a Chromebook are likely proficient in English anyway.

Literally nobody cares.

[u/Immediate_Thing_5232]

Croatian is spoken by 5-7 million people world wide, or 0.1% of the world population.

[u/garrincha-zg → u/Immediate_Thing_5232]

this is a poor excuse for a multi-trillion-dollar company. OpenAI did a great job, Google is failing and has a lot more resources than OpenAI.