[libvoikko] Mozvoikko 2.2

[Sjur Moshagen]

In addition to agreeing with what is already said, I have the following comments:

4. jan. 2016 kl. 10:56 skrev Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com>:
> There's the detail
> that Chromium/Chrome is getting more users and it never had Finnish
> spell checking, and same for all Windows users, or mobile users.

Or generally, about everything Google does, it does only for the languages for which it has language technology, as far as I am able to tell. And since their language technology is purely statistical, it means that only languages with huge text resources available (to Google) and at most moderate morphology will be served = most languages of the world is out.

AFA Google is concerned, I have given up (except for Android, see further down).

> The right way would be for Firefox to use the Linux system spell
> checking, for example GtkSpell (which uses Enchant which uses Voikko),

I would like that to happen as well, but the first thing to do is to enhance Enchant to support the newest libvoikko version, ie with multilingual support, and with support for hfst and vfst turned on by default. As the voikko integration in Enchant is now, it is hard-coded to Finnish only.

> and same for Chromium. But that didn't happen for the last decade and
> most other languages are still served by the Hunspell dictionaries so
> it's probably not going to happen easily, and I don't want to be the
> one trying to file and push those bugs forward to the
> English/Indo-European language browser developers.

The Divvun group is very much working on adding support for the non-English/non-indoeuropean (minority) languages, especially for languages not very well suited to Hunspell. If we can help, we will try to do that. Please tell us how :)

> Mobile use will also continue to replace traditional desktop use and
> getting integrated there is likewise a challenge. Technically Ubuntu
> Phone and other open efforts would be the closest ones to get into.
> Ubuntu uses Oxide (Chromium based) engine on the phone browser. But I
> guess the web app usage via Javascript libraries and such would be of
> bigger importance than system level integration, since browsing wise
> average people need spell-checking only in special occasions.

On the major mobile platforms the speller is tied to the keyboard. This is true for Android, iOS and Windows Phone - the rest I don’t know. The Divvun group has released a keyboard app targeted at minority languages (Sámi in the first release, but easily extendable to other languages), and we are now working on the next version with speller support. The speller used is not voikko-based, instead using hfst as the engine, mainly due to speed differences (we tested libvoikko in an early prototype, but it was too slow at least on lower-end 2015 phones). Using hfst-ospell should not be a major issue, as both it and voikko are now fst-based, and conversion from vfst to hfst should be trivial. Presently we only support Android and iOS, but the system is extensible, and adding support for other platforms should be within reasonable reach.

Sjur