Brad is an app designer, and he’s very excited about it. One of our main topics of conversation is amazing apps I should be using so I can experience the future as it unfolds. Most recently, Google Translate had my jaw unhinged.
Holy crap, this is like living in an episode of Star Trek. The app supports 90 languages, though Cherokee is still in development. Obviously, you can just type and the app will give you a written translation on your phone, but it also does a couple things that made me tear up:
• It translates signs in real time for six languages. You hold your camera up to a sign, the translation appears on your phone. It looks like you’re just reading the actual sign, which is magical. You can also take a photo of the sign to translate it in 36 more languages.
• You can speak into the device, hit a button for what language you’d like to translate to, and the app speaks for you in the native language of whomever you happen to be addressing. What?! What.
It’s been around for a while, but the voice tool is new. If you haven’t already, go play with it. It would be incredible for letting babies hear a wide range of foreign accents while they can still encode the sounds and more complex language rules. Also fun when you’re tipsy. Here it is, Free for iphone and Android.
The future! Neat.
Mighty Girl 
The sign thing blows my mind. Three cheers for the future.
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totally cool! have you seen Skype translator? It translates spoken word in real time. Spanish and English are available now, and there have been a bunch of demos of Chinese and other languages.
http://www.skype.com/en/translator-preview/
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Very, very cool. The app is free but is there a charge when you use it?
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It is humorous to me that the app tells the french speaker that you are pregnant with your (formal) child. As in, we don’t know each other all that well, but guess what? knocked up, stranger.
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Maybe I should be more clear and say that the translation is “I am pregnant with your (formal) child.”
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