Intelligent switching of IMEs

[roddy]

I did have a quick search, but couldn´t see anything. 

 

I would pay hard cash, if in small quantities, for something that sits on my desktop and keeps an eye on what I'm typing. If I suddenly typed tongfukezhan, it would think "aha, he's writing Chinese" and switch to my Chinese IME. And then when I went on to write "is the best tv program in history" it would switch back. This would save me, seemingly multiple times a day, happily typing away (admittedly not usually for more than a few syllables) without realising I'm in the wrong IME and generating gibberish. 

 

Surely this can't be too hard - commercially unrewarding, perhaps. Is this a good idea? Does it exist? Should it?

[Shelley]

This has happened to me too. Confusing the first few times it happens.

 

Even a keystroke to initiate the change would be good enough, I am sure I had a program that changed between the 2 with something like Alt + spacebar or similar, maybe it was Wenlin?

 

A bit like this? https://support.lenovo.com/lt/nb/solutions/HT509501

Edited April 21, 2020 at 05:30 PM by Shelley

[roddy]

Obviously (isn’t it?) I can use the keyboard. I don’t want to have to. 

[Shelley]

Oh ok. 

[Lu]

My computer does something like this - not per word, but per what I'm doing. I'm typing Dutch (or English) in a word document and click over to my browser to look something up in an online dictionary, press shift to start typing Chinese, start typing: Roman letters. The computer anticipates what it thinks I want to do. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell me what it decides and I mistype all the time. It's annoying as hell. I much prefer just hitting shift.

[Dlezcano]

7 hours ago, roddy said:

If I suddenly typed tongfukezhan, it would think "aha, he's writing Chinese" and switch to my Chinese IME

 

This problem drives me crazy too and I have thought about it lots of times. I am a mac user and I feel the handling of this issue in Macos is even worse than in windows since it changes randomly the input method when I change between programs. I think this shouldn't be so hard to do, but may be not enough multilingual users to make companies aware of this.

 

[imron]

14 minutes ago, Dlezcano said:

Macos is even worse than in windows since it changes randomly the input method when I change between programs.

This has never happened to me on macOS. 

[mungouk]

On OSX I hit command-space to switch between "ABC" and Pinyin-Simplified. Same to switch back again. Very simple.

 

In fact, since I bought a new Mac laptop in Beijing last year, what used to be the CAPS LOCK key is in now labelled "中/英" and switches between the two.

 

Like @imron I've never seen this change randomly when switching windows... Are some apps worse than others?

 

 

[Dlezcano]

I suspect it has something to do with 搜狗输入法. This problem doesn't happen very often, so I can't recall exactly the circumstances when this happens, but it occurs mainly while switching between chrome and other programs.

[mungouk]

Ah OK, I never use that... just the standard OSX IMEs.

So it sounds like it may not be the OSs fault after all...

 

[imron]

2 hours ago, Dlezcano said:

I suspect it has something to do with 搜狗输入法.

Yes, I guess it is almost certain to be something specific to this IME then.

[markhavemann]

10 hours ago, roddy said:

Surely this can't be too hard - commercially unrewarding, perhaps. Is this a good idea? Does it exist? Should it?

 

Sounds like something that might be able to be done in Autohotkey. 

 

I made something that changes all my mouse cursors to red when Chinese input is enabled, and back to white when English input is enabled.

 

So it's definitely possible to monitor and change IME's. One problem might be that changing between IME's can be slow so the transition might not be as seamless as I'd hope for, there might be ways around it though. 

 

An easy compromise might be something that you can set what IME you want for different windows or even different browser tabs and it will automatically change for you (Chinese in Baidu but English in Google)

[arrow]

I'm using Microsoft Pinyin AKA 微软拼音输入法, which is the default IME in Windows 10 Chinese version.

You can press SHIFT key (which is configurable) to switch between Chinese and English, and the current mode is displayed on the task bar.

[roddy]

For the sake of clarity - I know it's possible to switch manually between IMEs. My question is: why do I need to? I've got enough processing power sitting on my desk - and way more in the cloud - to look at my typing and figure out what language it's meant to be. My assumption is that in programming terms it's relatively trivial, but there's just little demand for it. Or perhaps I don't understand.

 

Imagine writing a document with a mix of Chinese and English. You're constantly swopping back and forth between IMEs and - worse - forgetting to swop back and forth and then having to go back and sort out the mess. Even if the autodetection isn't perfect, it could well be better. 

[imron]

59 minutes ago, roddy said:

My assumption is that in programming terms it's relatively trivial, but there's just little demand for it. Or perhaps I don't understand

Once you start looking at the edge cases, it’s decidedly non trivial.  Sure longer things like ‘tongfukezhan’ or ‘paishandaohai’ are easy, but what about ‘de’, ‘gang’, ‘you’ and a whole bunch of others that could be either Chinese or English. You’d need to have some sort of natural language processing to figure that out, and while the state of the art in NLP is getting pretty good, it’s not perfect by, and also non-trivial to build something close to accurate. 

[roddy]

Yeah, 'you' is clearly a problem. Minimum threshold for switching to Chinese of... two syllables? But then if you end up with something that sometimes switches and sometimes doesn't, it could be even more frustrating. 

 

Like I say, I know it wouldn't be perfect, like predictive text isn't perfect. It's still pretty useful though. 

[Dlezcano]

7 hours ago, markhavemann said:

I made something that changes all my mouse cursors to red when Chinese input is enabled, and back to white when English input is enabled

 

This sounds interesting, how can I do that and under which operating systems?

[imron]

2 hours ago, roddy said:

two syllables?

women

[roddy]

I know. It would be imperfect. 

[Tomsima]

i always thought wouldn't it be great to have a physical key that functions like a caps lock with a little light on it, that puts me into 'chinese lock'. It must be doable with autohotkey, but I'm not good enough to understand how the IME thing works. it would be great if you could just have a layer set up for each language...