So while conversations are “real time,” they’re a bit halting as you wait for the translations, and they have to be simple so as not to confuse the app. The app isn’t good at interpreting a pause in speech as a period ending a sentence or a comma before a new clause. Translations in Spanish, French and English alike fell apart pretty quickly if we tried to move beyond simple sentences. It seems likely that the app is more attuned to native speakers of particular languages. For this conversation we had to hold the phone up to our mouths, using it more like a traditional microphone. It had a difficult time differentiating between words that are similar in Spanish but wildly different in English (for instance, the app several times interpreted S í, which means yes in Spanish, as Si, the Spanish word for if, or the letter “C” in English). The app seemed to get tripped up several times by her American accent. Some sentences came back in English somewhat garbled (“what you eat and when you were there” instead of “what did you eat when you were there”), but for the most part it was pretty easy to maintain a dialogue using context clues.Ī conversation with a Spanish speaker didn’t go as well - but the speaker in our test wasn’t fully fluent. In our tests using a high-end Moto X smartphone, the app was able to translate several sentences flawlessly when I spoke with a colleague fluent in French about Paris.

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