iTranslate Converse
An attempt to create a speech translation App that actually works.
Our new App iTranslate Converse is featured right now on TheVerge, is a top app on the App Store as well as Top Trending on ProductHunt.
So what is the buzz all about:
iTranslate Converse literally turns your iPhone into a translation device. But you might ask: what is so unique about yet another speech translation App?
Well, iTranslate Converse brings 3 major innovations that may seem small on first sight but actually make a huge difference when using the App in real life scenarios. But here’s some background, before I go into these:
At iTranslate we are creating translation products since over 7 years now. Our special focus always has been speech translation which, as we believe, is going to fundamentally change the way people communicate with each other. From what we can tell, the industry is still in its very early days and we are far away from a perfect product.
When it comes to translation products, most people tend to focus a lot on the technology part, the AI if you want. Of course machine translation is what fundamentally enables any translation product and the industry as a whole is doing its best to gradually improve the quality. However, what people often forget, is that a good translation product is not only about the underlying technology but also about how you interact with it.
With iTranslate Converse our primary goal is to improve the user interaction layer to solve 3 areas that create a lot of friction:
- It should work robust in all environments, even if there is background noise.
- It should be fast and fun to use.
- It should be simple and natural to do a back & forth conversation.
To solve those problems we are introducing 3 innovations to iTranslate Converse:
- We force users to flip the phone upside down. There are 2 reasons for that: first, you get much better speech inputs, because it puts the Microphone much closer to your mouth. Second, it is also more natural to do a back and forth conversation holding the phone like that.
- We turn the entire screen into one huge button that can be controlled with 2 simple gestures: Tap & Hold to speak and and release to translate. This gives you full control over start & stop, which means way less unintended inputs. If you turn on 3D touch haptic feedback in the App’s settings you don’t even need to look at the screen anymore.
- The third innovation is automatic language detection (between the 2 selected languages). In most translation Apps you need to make a deliberate choice of the language before speaking. With auto detection you simply speak and the App figures out the language itself, which makes conversations much simpler.
In a nutshell: You flip the phone to hold it like a microphone. You Tap & Hold to speak and release to translate.
The end result is a speech translation App that is blazing fast, fun to use and works way better in many real life scenarios especially in noisy environments (we even tested it in a club and it worked pretty good).
However, you need to really feel it to get it. So please go ahead and feel free to download the iTranslate Converse App right now from the App Store — it’s free:
Our journey doesn’t stop there though: one of the biggest critics of speech translation Apps remains that they require an active Internet connection. Especially for speech translations Apps this is a problem, since they are most useful abroad. Our goal is to change that as well. Stay tuned…
For now, thanks to the amazing people at iTranslate for making this happen!
