As a leader in the search engine industry, Google is a familiar name around the world. Even in locations where it’s not the top search engine, it’s often fresh in the minds of users thanks to additional, helpful features. Google certainly has no shortage of those, and one of their more popular services is the “Google Translate” utility. This service allows users to quickly translate their context content into another language, with dozens of languages on the list of supported options. They’ve also brought this tool to Android devices, and a recent update is rolling out a number of new features — including the impressive “conversation mode.”
According to the official Google blog, Google’s new rendition of Translate for Android will act very similarly to the version released one year ago; you can access all the features that were once computer-based only (for example, transliteration of foreign languages that don’t use roman characters, machine translation, etc.). Several mobile only features are also part of this powerful application, including translation via voice input (which supports 15 languages) and translation of text messages.
The recent update, though, brings two very new aspects. First, the look and feel of the application has been revamped, and it’s now easier to find which language you want to translate to and from. More importantly, however, is the new “conversation mode.” This mode will allow two users to speak into the device and have the device speak a translation back. Google is quick to warn us that this feature is limited — it’s in alpha stage and only supports English to Spanish and Spanish to English — but they’re still excited for the possibilities this will bring.
The current version of translate mobile is available for all Android systems running version 2.1 and up.
