Tag: Translate

WWDC 2020 Part 1: iOS Home Screen Grows Up, Siri Moves In and More

In a first ever, Apple held a 100% digital version of WWDC, bringing welcome improvements across all of the company’s platforms.

CEO Tim Cook began the conference, taking the opportunity to address the major issues the world is facing, especially racial inequality and the coronavirus pandemic. Cook pointed out that it was more important than ever for Apple to continue to innovate, supporting its users and being a positive force for change.

He then turned the program over to Craig Federighi to highlight some of the changes to iOS

iOS 14 Home Screen

Federighi immediately launched into some of the biggest changes coming in iOS 14, including an improved Home Screen.

The iOS Home Screen has remained largely unchanged over the years, adding only incremental improvements, such as Folders. With iOS 14, Apple’s mobile OS finally offers substantial improvements to the Home Screen, giving users the option to hide entire pages of apps. In their place, iOS has an App Library view that automatically groups apps according to category, and makes recommendations based on usage.

iOS App Library

iOS 14 also includes the ability to add widgets directly to the Home Screen, with apps rearranging around them.

Picture-in-Picture (PiP)

Apple is bringing one of the most popular features of the iPad to the iPhone in iOS 14, namely PiP. The feature will work similarly to its larger counterpart, letting users watch videos while working on other apps.

iPhone PiP

Siri

Siri receives some welcome upgrades as well. First and foremost is on-device dictation. Un previous versions, every interaction with Siri requires internet connectivity. While searches will still require an internet connection, dictation will be done entirely on the iPhone.

Siri also benefits from a streamlined interface, displaying as a small bubble at the bottom of the screen, rather than taking up the entire view.

Siri Interface

Translate

Apple is unveiling its own translation software, but with a typical Apple flair. The software will automatically keep up with who is saying what, translate and display the results accordingly.

Apple Translate

Messages

Messages includes some major upgrades, including inline replying and mentions. Users can set their group message notification settings to only notify them when they are directly mentioned in the thread.

Apple Messages

Another welcome benefit is the ability to pin conversations to the top of the list, making it easier to refer back to popular or important threads.

Maps

Maps has been upgraded to include information for cyclists, including where they will have to deal with stairs, and giving them the option of avoiding stairs altogether.

Maps will also include information to help electric vehicle owners to find charging stations and plan their trips accordingly.

CarPlay

CarPlay is getting a major new feature that will allow an iPhone to lock/unlock and start a compatible car.

CarPlay will use NFC to create a digital car key that is securely stored on the iPhone. Additional keys can be created and shared with others, so someone else can access the vehicle if needed. The feature will also be brought to iOS 13.

Stay tuned for Part 2—iPadOS

June 22, 2020
Google Translate’s Awesome Visual Translation Feature Gets 20 New Languages

When Google first unveiled its visual translation feature inside the Google Translate app, it seemed pretty damn cool. But after a recent trip overseas, it proved itself incredibly useful.

Google has just made it even more useful by adding a bunch of new languages. Before, you could hold your phone up to a road sign, menu, or whatever and receive an instant, video translation in seven languages – English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

No, it’s up to 27.

You can now translate to and from English and Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. You can also do one-way translations from English to Hindi and Thai (from English, but not to English).

Each language pack is less than 2MB, and works offline.

This means that the Google Translate app now lets you do instant video translations in 27 languages, and photo translations in 37.

With the app update, Google has also improved the speed of voice translations.

“In many emerging markets, slow mobile networks can make it challenging to access many online tools – so if you live in an area with unreliable mobile networks, our other update today is for you. In addition to instant visual translation, we’ve also improved our voice conversation mode (enabling real-time translation of conversations across 32 languages), so it’s even faster and more natural on slow networks,” says Barak Turovsky, Google Translate lead.

July 29, 2015
Microsoft Has Shattered The Language Barrier

The language barrier is an insurmountable wall for many people. Those of us who have spent three years in high school Spanish and came away with nothing can attest to that. That’s why so many of us have put faith into translation programs like BabelFish and Google Translate. Microsoft now takes it a step further with instant speech recognition and translation.

Microsoft Research shared a video on their YouTube channel today that demonstrates the new technology. Here’s what you’re going to see below:

Chief Research Officer Rick Rashid demonstrates a speech recognition breakthrough via machine translation that converts his spoken English words into computer-generated Chinese language. The breakthrough is patterned after deep neural networks and significantly reduces errors in spoken as well as written translation.

I can’t vouch for how accurate the Chinese translation is, but it’s already incredibly impressive. The software is able to output the spoken Chinese word in the speaker’s voice as if they were the one saying it.

I think it’s safe to say that Microsoft has shattered the language barrier. Language translation software is only going to get better in the future, and we may soon have those futurist gadget that instantly translates anything a person says in the listener’s native tongue.

November 8, 2012
Blogger Rolls Out Three New Gadgets For Your Unique Blog

If you’ve been feverishly toiling at that blog you really hope to option off for a movie deal in the near future, Blogger has introduced three new tools to help you catch the ears and eyes of a larger audience. After all, your blog might be better suited for a Korean period piece film instead of a mid-summer Hollywood blockbuster/romcom starring Sylvester Stallone.

The first and perhaps most useful of the new tools is a Google Translate gadget you can affix to your blog. You likely compose your blog in one language or, if you’re a polyglot, maybe you dabble around in multi-lingual posts to add an air of mystery to your fine words. At any rate, there’s always a chance that someone may not read the language you wrote your post in, but fret no longer. Now they won’t have to miss out on your dizzying command of your language because if you add the Google Translate gadget to your page, your blog can be automatically translated into any of over 50 languages that Translate supports.

Then again, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone who doesn’t speak your language would not only come across your blog but also have the overwhelming desire to read it since, due to the language barrier, that visitor presumably has no idea what you’re blogging about.

Moving along, the second and third new gadgets that are now available on Blogger are pretty similar to the Blog List, which keeps track of the other blogs that you enjoy and recommend – I believe the nomenclature for such a list is “blog roll.” The first of the two, Link List, is described as such: “Add a collection of your favorite sites, blogs, or web pages.” Given you already have a feature to keep track of and promote blogs and other sites with Blog List, this one feels slightly redundant. However, maybe you have a high demand for organization and want to keep your blog roll separate from lists with non-blog sites, like the Washington Post or the BBC.

With the final addition to the Blogger inventory of tools, List allows you to simply type up some things (…) about what you like, such as your favorite books or foods or, really, anything you want. It’s just a text list, so you can do whatever you want with it. Throw a recipe in there. List your favorite parts of the periodic table. Recount the first names of all your exes. Do you see the extraordinary possibilities contained with this one? Given that this is kind of what you’ve already been doing on your blog, this seems a little redundant, too, but maybe you can use it as a quick reference list for your readers, especially now that you’re going to be building up your international audience.

[Via Blogger Buzz.]

May 2, 2012
Google eBooks Adds Define, Translate and Search Features

Google has announced some new features for their eBooks, available from the Google eBookstore. Google’s eBookstore has around 3 million books, both free and paid and they are available on the web, Nook, iOS devices and Android.

These new features apply to the eBooks web reader. Now you can define, translate and search specific words within the text easily, with two clicks of the mouse. Either double click or highlight a single word within a Google eBook, and a menu will pop up with five options: Search, Translate, Search Book, Search Google and Search Wikipedia.

These new features only work in “flowing text” mode, not “scanned pages” mode. Note that some books can be switched over to flowing text mode, but not all Google eBooks are available as such.

Defining a word will pull from Google Dictionary, and it will pop up right on the page instead of navigating away. Many words will also have the audio icon next to them, so you can hear the words pronounced without leaving the page. If you click “more,” you’ll be taken to the full Google Dictionary page for the word in question.

You can also translate words or even entire paragraphs into any of the languages Google offers in its translate service. For the Hatian Creole struggling with his Bulgarian text, this function is for them.

The final new functions offered are search functions. “Search Book” will search the selected word or phrase throughout the book you’re reading. “Search Google” and “Search Wikipedia” will open up a new window and do a full search of the word or phrase in the respective engines.

Oh, and first person to identify the book used in the demonstrations gets (doesn’t really get) 10 internet bucks! (Shouldn’t be too hard, people)

May 20, 2011
Fun With Google Translate

Translation tools, while useful, aren’t always what you would call “fun to play around with.” But that’s not entirely accurate, as people have found a couple of ways to mess around with the audio language translation to make it a bit more…musical.

Over on the Google Blog, they give us a couple examples of the musicality of their translate application.

When we built Google Translate we thought it was a cool tool, but we have to admit we had fairly straightforward ideas about what it would be useful for (lowering language barriers and making more web content available to people around the world). As with many inventions, though, it turns out people have found uses for the tool that we never imagined. Recently, two clever Translate trends caught our eye—perhaps one of them will inspire you to come up with a fun Translate trick of your own.

Oh, Google – you thought people would use applications for their intended purpose…bwahaha.

First up, watch as the English to German translation tool is used to create a simply beatbox. If you want to go to Google translate now and try it yourself, just enter a bunch of p’s, v’s, k’s and other hard consonants and the little blue icon will actually change from “listen” to “beatbox.”

Google didn’t put this one on the blog, but I like it:

In Taiwan, the Google Translate music trend has really caught fire. Someone uploaded a video of Chinese phrases being translated, and set to music. This video was a top YouTube trend, garnering half a million views a couple weeks ago. It was one of the most viewed videos in Taiwan:

And then there’s this…whatever this may be:

She sure didn’t get to 10 million followers with stuff like that.

May 17, 2011