Assistant ignores languge of prompt

Maxolino

When prompting Kagi Assistant in a different language than I set in my Kagi interface to, it will ignore the language of the prompt and respond in the language that I set my Kagi interface to:

That is not a good behavior as the quality of many models suffer when using any language other then English. Not only that but it even creates code comments in non English which forces me to either remove or translate them, because I don't wamt to have non English code comments.

Just setting my Kagi interface to English will not fix this as I might want to prompt in my native language and then it would create the output in English instead.

I think the Assistant should follow up in the language it is prompted in.

sarno

I'd hope that, if this gets worked on, a setting is exposed in the UI to toggle this behaviour.

Personally, I can imagine cases in which I would want The Assistant to respond in the language I've selected, even if I'm not necessarily currently using that language myself. That said, I can also definitely appreciate why one would prefer that it not do this - so I wouldn't argue against it being worked on; just in us having the choice. 😃

Maxolino

sarno I think by choosing the language I write my prompt in, I can easily make sure that the assistant is responding in the language of my choosing. I cannot really imagine a use case where I don't write the prompt in the language I want the response to be in 😉

Still, if it is an easy on the fly setting that includes an option "Same language as prompted" I would not mind a setting for this.

sarno

Maxolino I cannot really imagine a use case where I don't write the prompt in the language I want the response to be in

I'm sure that's true for you personally as one single individual. 😃

Any biligual people working as part of an organisation - be it an employer or a FOSS community - that prefer to use their own native language but require generated code comments / email drafts / other output from The Assistant be in the common language of the organisation (typically, though not always, this will be English) might reasonably ask what the point of having a language setting in the UI is if it's ignored in favour of matching the prompt.

Indeed, I would argue that those using a second (or third...) language they aren't as comfortable in would be more likely - not equally or less likely - than others to lean on such AI tools to help them in their written communications. While Kagi Translate also exists, it sort of assumes you already have an appropriate message to provide as the input - and I don't see why whole groups of people should be expected - rather unnecessarily, in my view - to spend more time using multiple tools when it seems that a single tool should reasonably be expected to be sufficient.

Then there's additional use cases - such as someone simply wanting every conceivable opportunity to practice using a language they are actively trying to learn, even when everyday contacts don't use that language themselves.

Going back to the bilingual example from earlier - one could invert it and ask about examples of, say, a web developer who is searching for help writing some JavaScript and all of the results (e.g. Stack Overflow) will inevitably be in English - but just because the input they copy and paste is in English, doesn't mean that's the language they would prefer to receive a response in.

While some or all of these quick examples might seem daft to you, there's an entire world out there of different languages and cultures that sees people in different circumstances relying upon tools such as Kagi Translate, The Assistant, Kagi Search, and more besides for a whole host of different use cases. Each of those users is valid, and each of their perspectives deserves to be respected.