When you go to a foreign country, you may end up staying in places where nobody can speak the languages you know. TIW (Technology Improves the World), an IT company based in Czech Republic, is trying to problem a solution to this problem with Droid Translator, an Android that leverages Google’s Android speech-to-text, voice recognition, and translation technology to translate live text or audio chats or even Skype or mobile calls.
I gave it a quick try. First you need to have Skype installed on your device, and a Skype, as Droid Translator will import your Skype contacts. There’s the Free version linked above, and a PRO version for about $6.5. The free version only support DT chat (text and audio chat), and the paid version adds Mobile, and Skype calls (Audio and Video) support.
The following language are said to be supported: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Chinese Simplified, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese. However, some of the language are only supported with text chat, the languages with audio chat support are limited to the languages where voice recognition is available. I tried to enable Thai, and it was not available for this feature.
Since I installed the free version, I could only use DT chat, and the most exciting features is the audio chat features which works that way. You press the microphone button, say something, Android’s voice recognition kicks in, show the text in your native language on your screen, send it over to the other phone, where it is translate, and optionally outputted via Android’s text-to-speech engine. I used it for French <->English translation, and it works, but some of the translations are pretty funny. Voice recognition does not always work perfectly either, but the good thing is that you’ll see something went wrong and have the opportunity to give it another try.
If you want to see a live demo (English <-> Russian) of DT chat audio, what Charbax video below.
Thanks to CSilie for the tip.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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