It’s telling that Apple chose an app that debuted more than 14 months ago, Instagram, as its “iPhone App of the Year” for 2011. This should not imply that there was a shortage of quality and groundbreaking apps released this year. Far from it.
From social magazines to music discovery apps to console-quality games that players can hold in the palms of their hands, there are hundreds of new titles in the iTunes App Store that will inform, organize, and entertain virtually anyone who owns an iOS device. As more choices become available to different kinds of consumers, however, it’s difficult to identify the undisputed champions of the app world.
We picked 20 of the best iOS applications that came out or received significant updates in 2011. The list is a healthy mix of free and paid titles that can run on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. (We will follow up with a separate top 20 list just for games, which are not included in this list). → Read More
Itching to strike up a conversation with a certain foreign someone, but the language barrier is too much to overcome? Never fear, you wannabe polyglot: the latest update to the Google Translate Android app adds 12 new languages to conversation mode.
Conversation mode, if you haven’t seen it, is a nifty feature exclusive to the Android version of Google Translate. It takes a user’s voice input, translates it into a different language, plays the translation out loud, and repeats the process in reverse. It sounds a bit cumbersome, but it works reasonably well and provides a (nearly) real-time way to converse with your foreign friends. → Read More
At one point, as tensions were rising between Google and Apple, it seemed as if the search giant would forgo native app development on the iOS platform and instead only offer service those users through HTML5-based web apps. But lately, that approach has been changing, quickly. In just the past few months, we’ve seen apps like Google Voice, Latitude, and Places all launch natively. And today brings another: Google Translate.
Google Translate has previously been available on the iPhone via an HTML5 experience since mid 2008. But again, now iPhone users are getting a native experience with some significant new additions. Those include the awesome “speak-to-translate” and “listen to your translations”. Another new feature allows you to enlarge translated text to full-screen mode so you can more easily show it to someone you’re trying to communicate with. → Read More
When it came to translations, you used to either need an interpreter or a book to navigate another language. That was either costly or cumbersome, respectively. Then the Internet came along and made things significantly easier. Except you had to be chained to your computer to translate something. A year ago, Google made things easier again by launching their Translate app for Android. But that’s nothing compared to what they’re releasing today.
The latest version of Google Translate for Android comes with a few updates to celebrate the one-year anniversary. Most of these are to the user interface. But there’s also one new feature they’re previewing in alpha mode. And it’s awesome: Conversation Mode. → Read More
For reasons inexplicable, a “Today I Learned” thread on Reddit has turned into how to make Google Translate beatbox for you, among other things. It must have taken some intense experimentation for Redditor Harrichr to get here but it seems like a peculiarity of the German translation setup in Google Translate is allowing for playing consonants in a way that sounds like drums. Or, more specifically, a delightful way that sounds like drums. → Read More
Back in October, we came across a mysterious site called Google Demo Slam a couple days before it actually launched. It turned out to be a fun site featuring demos of different Google products where you can watch two demos side by side and vote for the best one.
Some of the demos are by Google engineers, but anyone can submit their own and vie to become a Google Demo Slam champ. Below are a few of the best demos on the site so far. The first one is four guys pretending to be Mount Rushmore and doing such a good job that they fool Google Goggles into identifying them as the real thing. The second shows two women using Google Translate to get their computer to order Indian food in Hindi. The third one demonstrates how to give yourself a haircut using Google Chat and two computers. And the fourth one recreates a road trip on Route 66 with Google Street View, a couple couches, and a projector. (Videos after the jump). → Read More
While incredibly useful, Google Translate is also known for its occasional snafus. For example, an English to French translation of “videos on Vimeo” previously resulted in “des videos sur YouTube.” Another example of a wonky translation took place when Kai-Fu Lee, president of the search giant’s China operations, left the company.
Today’s questionable result comes from an English to Italian translation of “call us for free.” The phrase returns in Italian as “Telefonare gratis con Skype.” The reverse translation results in ‘call us for free.’ → Read More
Google Translate doesn’t always get every translation right, but it is useful enough to get the gist of a Webpage or even a menu written in a foreign language. It’s machine translation, so what do you expect? But now Google will even teach you to talk like a machine with a voice synthesizer button that reads out translations for 34 languages.
Some of the languages, such as English or French, are smoother than others, But when you click on the text-to-speech icon to translate a sentence to Chinese or Dutch, it sounds like a robot. And so will you if you mimic it exactly. But don’t complain, now you can get free language lessons simply by typing sentences into Google Translate. → Read More
Ever since I upgraded my beloved Chrome browser to version 5 on my (Windows) computer, I’ve been wanting to get something off my chest about a new feature that was baked into it, one that annoys me to no end.
With the update to the most recent version of the program came an integration with Google Translate, a feature that makes a custom toolbar appear under the bookmarks bar whenever I visit a Web page that contains text in a language other than English. Basically, Google Chrome supposes that I don’t understand any other languages besides English by default and enables me to translate Web pages in say, Spanish or Dutch, with one click.
Thanks for the help, Google, but how about you let me turn that damn toolbar off? → Read More
While Google Translate is certainly not perfect in many of its translations, the site is undoubtedly an incredibly useful tool when trying to interpret a word, phrase or entire site in a different language. Today, Google has added nine more languages to Google Translate: Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish, bringing the number of languages that are supported up to 51.
Google says that with the latest addition, the site now supports all 23 of the official EU languages. And following the events in Iran during the elections, Google added Persian (Farsi) to Google Translate. Google warns users that quality of the translation for the new languages is still basic and may have some glitches. → Read More
In response to the events surrounding the Iranian election last week, Google and Facebook have both added the Persian language Farsi to their capabilities. The Persian version of Facebook will be available starting tonight. The Facebook blog post announcing the new version is here.
Facebook says the Persian version was already being developed but it decided to unveil it because of the sudden increase in activity with the Iranian elections and protests. Facebook adds the disclaimer that the translation is still in rough form.
If your browser is set to Farsi, you should automatically see the Persian version of Facebook. Facebook says that more than 400 Persian speakers submitted thousands of individual translations of the site. → Read More
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