If there was ever an issue that the folks behind the (Disrupt audience choice winning) mobile translation app Vocre needed to address, it’s that Vocre has only ever been available for iOS users. Fortunately for you Android-using non-polyglots out there, that’s all changed — Vocre has just pushed its voice translation app into the Google Play store.
Getting started with the app is a very straightforward affair — Vocre for Android supports a total of 35 languages and dialects, and after selecting the two languages the users wish to converse in, the first would-be chatter hits a button and says something (“Hello!”). At that point, Vocre pings Nuance to convert that into a text string, translates the utterances into the target language and reads it aloud (“Konnichiwa!“).
I’ve spent a few hours playing with the Android version, and I’m pleased to report that things work just fine. The interface is nearly identical as the one seen in the iOS app so platform-switchers should be able to pick up right where they left off — the only mildly annoying difference that I noticed was that the Android version didn’t offer any visual feedback to let users know that it was actually listening to them speak (the Android version also lacks support for Vietnamese, but I think I can live with that). The quality of the translations generally seems pretty solid as well, although Vocre isn’t immune to the occasional awkward sentence (but hey, aren’t we all?).
That’s all a welcome change from last night when Vocre first appeared in the Google Play Store — for some reason, the app wouldn’t accept voice input for translation on certain devices (a real bummer considering that’s the big draw here), but a speedy update from the team seems to have gotten everything ship-shape in short order.
Like its iOS counterpart, Vocre for Android requires you to shell out just a bit of dough — $2.99, to be precise. Still, the prospect of smoother relations in foreign languages (not to mention the benefit of not having to deal with in-app purchases) makes Vocre well worth your attention.