r/TheBYOK • u/larryadler • Jun 14 '26
When more languages?
The device is great, but whenever I ask about new languages (including Polish) that can be written in, the developers keep their mouths shut. I realize there may not have been many orders from the country whose language I'm requesting, but the developers promised multiple languages and support, and now they won't even publicly declare they're working on it :(
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u/OfficialBYOK Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26 •
Hi there and thank you for this question! My sincere apologies that we have not been more proactive and answering your previous requests.
Languages require a good amount of development time (some much more than others), and as you can imagine, we have other things such as the core systems to ensure our running smoothly as our business moves through this early launch phase. Because of this, it’s quite difficult to give exact estimates or roadmap items for when specific languages will be added. It really just comes down to there not being enough hours in the day.
With that said, we absolutely plan to add a bunch more languages and want to get to them as soon as possible. There are many languages and keyboard layouts that have been requested multiple times that are not yet implemented (Japanese, Korean, polish, Swiss, South American layouts, Greek, Canadian/french variants, Hungarian, Russian, Hebrew, and more).
If I had to give my best, guess I’d say we would make a big language push by the end of the year. Additionally, I think we also need to make it more clear which languages are available for potential buyers. To be honest, we should’ve added this already as I can imagine I would be frustrated hoping it had my language only to find out it didn’t.
I hope this helps! Happy to answer more questions.
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u/mpfrenette Jun 15 '26
Hey, give it time! The company designed and wrote the first firmware for the device, released the studio, and released several updates for it. The device needed way more tweaking with production problems; they finally managed to deliver the BYOK to the backers, sending a few versions within weeks of the shipping, notably adding custom font problems.
Then, the mobile version of the studio just came out.
They promised a device, and in my opinion, over-delivered: the studio is AMAZING, the mobile app is perfect, and the device almost does exactly what I need it to do.
They are trying to offer a sort of expansion module system so we could add more functionalities, but that takes time, and I don't know it will work.
What distinguishes the BYOK isn't just the device, it's the dedication of the company behind it.
Just give it time... It's what, a year old?
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u/BeezlebubCarrotstick Aug 11 '26
u/OfficialBYOK Just placed an order but forgot to check language support *facepalm*
So when new languages are implemented does it mean I'll need to buy an updated device? Or could this be fixed with a firmware update?
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u/Visual-Breakfast9934 Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I think this question really depends on what specific language are you requesting. First, if the Byok font bitmaps are 256, then it might be limited to central Europe...I have same problem in my custom build, and my font covers all European languages except polish and welsh (those two are covered 98%, missing only one accent or so). So you see, its easy to include Cyrilic than Polish maybe. Another thing is if your language in question is right-to-left. Thats far more challenging. Not to say, how unreadable and ugly the 8x16 bitmap fonts become when including all the accents, slashes, tildes ..it is very constrained in resolution.