Converse Turns Your iPad Into A Babelfish For Your Lap

This is just an awesome idea for an app: Converse by Riot Software turns your iPad into a traveling, dual-keyboard kiosk that will allow you to have a conversation with anyone you might encounter, no matter how bizarre and filled with phlegmatic squawks his native language is.

Load Converse up on your iPad and two keyboards will pop up, one on each hemisphere of the display. You can specify a language for each keyboard: once that’s done, typing a word or sentence onto one keyboard will result in that word translating into the other keyboard’s language, and vice versa.

As someone who has a pretty impressive vocabulary of physical gestures after years of traveling without a lick of knowledge of any language besides English, I can see how useful this would be. If you can’t communicate with someone, just open up your iPad and start typing. This would also be pretty good for finally asking out that cute foreign girl you (literally) don’t know how to talk to.

Converse is $4.99 and can be downloaded here.

John Brownlee

John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.