translation

The highlight of Apple’s recent AI efforts is Live Translation, but that’s not the only new Apple Intelligence feature unveiled at WWDC on Monday. There are also improvements to visual intelligence and Image Playground. Plus, third-party app developers can access Apple’s AI models for free.

But the keynote address kicking off the Mac maker’s developers conference was short on big AI-related announcements when compared to what’s coming out of OpenAI or Google. Still, the company did what it could.

“Last year, we took the first steps on a journey to bring users intelligence that’s helpful, relevant, easy to use, and right where users need it, all while protecting their privacy. Now, the models that power Apple Intelligence are becoming more capable and efficient, and we’re integrating features in even more places across each of our operating systems,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering.

Planning on traveling soon? If you’re going international, you might want to bring along something that will make communicating in another language easier. No, we don’t mean a dictionary, and we certainly don’t mean Google Translate.

Mymanu Clik S are award-winning translation earbuds. Pop them in your ears, and they will feed you a live translation of a conversation in a variety of languages. And right now, these futuristic earbuds cost less than ordinary AirPods. You can snag a pair for just $99 (regularly $220) with code CLIK.

We live in a multicultural world, but a translation feature built into Safari in iOS 14 will make it just a bit easier for us to understand one another. Converting a web page from an unknown languages into your preferred one is as easy a couple of screen taps.

The same holds true for iPadOS 14, too.

Soon you’ll visit a webpage in an unfamiliar language and see it automatically translated to one you can read with the iPhone Safari web browser. This reportedly will be a feature of iOS 14.

No third-party app will be needed. And the translation will supposedly take place directly on the handset, not a remote server.

I live in Germany, and even though my German is fine, I often get beaten by notices and signs. In my native England, signs and notices are snappy. They use few words, and often annoying slogans, to get the point across. In Germany, an A4 (legal-size) sheet of paper with densely spaced type is the norm. And that’s just from neighbors complaining about people leaving their strollers on the wrong side of the entrance hall.

So, I decided to do something about it. I wrote a Siri Shortcut that scans one of these German essays using the iPhone’s camera, translates it, and shows it to you. There are apps that can do something similar, but my shortcut is way better, for several reasons.

From Star Trek to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, one of the signs of the future is a portable device that instantly translates languages. Well, it’s 2019, so we should expect things to feel properly futuristic.

Right on cue, we’ve now got access to an ultra-light, sleek, portable translator. And unlike the Babel fish, you don’t even need to stick it in your ear.

How do you translate a PDF? Maybe you scanned a page from a friend’s German cake recipes book. Or perhaps you’re living abroad and you have no idea what the police just made you sign. There are plenty of ways to translate PDFs and text, but most of them involve either A) Microsoft Word or B) uploading your private documents to a cloud service to be read.

Today we’ll see how to quickly scan a paper document, then translate its written text into English. You’ll be amazed at how fast it is.

Microsoft Edge for iOS now boasts instant web page translation.

The feature lets you visit your favorite foreign sites and enjoy them in your native tongue. It also gives you the option to quickly switch back to the site’s original language with little effort.

Do you ever find yourself staring at a web page, unable to understand a word? All the letters look familiar, only they’re arranged into some weird order? That’s called “foreign,” and it’s how people from outside America talk to each other. Some of them don’t even write their websites in English.

Fortunately, a good old American company has done something about this terrible habit. Microsoft Translator can fix up a web page and turn all that foreign gibberish into a language we can all feel comfortable with. You may already use Google’s translate bookmarklet for this, but Microsoft’s version is so much better it’s in a different league.

Siri translation seems like the most obvious thing in the world. You probably already asked him/her the meaning of a foreign word, or how to say an English phrase in another language. Under iOS 11, though, this will actually work.

All you have to do is to ask Siri how to say something, and s/he will respond with an answer. Even better, you can use Type to Siri to make the query, which may come in handy when you’re in a line at the market and you don’t want to start talking into your iPhone.

Instagram is going to make it easier to understand posts in foreign languages. In the coming months, the service will rollout a new translate button that will help you understand the full story, no matter which language it was posted in.

The new Google Translate is ready for the iPhone and iPad, and it’s a fantastic update. While other apps are better at giving you context and points of grammar, Google’s app is hard to beat for fast translations of single words or phrases.

And now it adds a third way to input words: handwriting.

TweetDeck for Mac just got a pretty nice update via the Mac App Store that introduces a new user interface and a number of new features. Users will find it’s now easier to navigate their way around the app thanks to a new sidebar, while the built-in translation makes it easier to communicate with foreign friends.

Most Mac users will experience one of three reactions after reading the word “Rosetta.”

The first involves breaking into a cold sweat, and possibly hives, after remembering that Apple no longer supports the translator that ran all those old, useful apps written for PowerPC-based Macs after Apple switched over to Intel chips.

Option two, imagining the Rosetta Stone itself, the magical key to unlocking ancient script, stumbled upon by Napoleon’s troops

Or there’s an association with foreign phrases, mall carts and almost certainly the most recognizable name in language software, Rosetta Stone.

We’re focusing on that last one here, and about how Rosetta Stone has finally brought their language software, in the form of the Navigator series apps, to the iPhone — for free.

Although it’s been almost over a week since the carnage of the Boston Marathon Bombings and the related manhunt and shootout came to a close, but there are still a lot more questions than answers about what happened and why.

A new report from Boston.com, though, has filled in some of the blanks in regards to the three hours on April 18th in which the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked a Mercedes driven by a 26-year-old Chinese man… and it looks like an iPhone app helped save his life.

Do you trust the translations you see on Chinese menus? I don’t. Why? Because my local Chinese restaurant — which lists dishes in Chinese, English and Spanish — manages to write a different description for each one.

Luckily, Waigo is here to help, with it’s augmented-reality translation. Or is that “here to confuse”?

Chances are you’ve heard of the popular app iTranslate Voice that made a splash when it landed on the App Store earlier this year. iTranslate voice made it easy to quickly translate phrases and sentences, right on your iPhone.

Well, the folks at Tapity and Sonico Mobile haven’t been standing still, releasing a brand new app today called Languages that builds on the foundation of iTranslate Voice. I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks, and it really is an incredible application.

One of my favorite jailbreak tweaks for the iPhone 4S (before I updated to iOS 5.1 and lost my jailbreak) was called Lingual, which enabled Siri to connect to Microsoft’s Bing Translate API and immediately translate words or phrases into a number of different languages.

Thanks to iTranslate Voice, you can now get the same functionality and more for any iPhone from the App Store. This excellent $0.99 app listens to you speak, then quickly translates your sentences into one of 31 languages. It’s super quick and incredibly accurate.

There’s so much that’s impressive about the technology we all carry in our pockets that it’s easy to take it for granted. But one of the things that constantly amazes me when I see it in action is instant language translation.

Vocre (pronounced voh-creee) is a translation app that’s not new on the App Store, but has one important new feature: it’s free.

VoxOx’s free telephony app was already heavy on features when it launched earlier this year. Now it adds two more big features: outbound faxing capability (previously the app only had the ability to receive faxes) and two-way, realtime SMS translations.

Word Lens is the app making jaws drop all over the internet this morning, thanks to this appropriately jaw-dropping demo video:

The video says it all, but you might be left wondering: is it a hoax? Can it really be as good as that?