Microsoft Launches Translator App For iOS & Android With Wearable Support

Microsoft has released its Translate app for iOS and Android that can be used on a wide variety of devices and supports 50 different languages. However, Google’s Translate app still supports only 27 languages for text and voice conversion. So Microsoft’s new mobile app brings them in tight competition with Google’s popular Google Translate software.

Users can speak or type words or phrases into Microsoft Translator, which the app shows the translated text on the screen and then speaks it too. Users can also copy paste text into the app from other apps for faster translations. However, not all languages will talk back to you with the translation. For example, if you speaking in English and asking to translate to Spanish will read back the Spanish translation. While asking it to speak the Hebrew translation does not work. You cannot speak to translate in all languages, like Hebrew, but you can many of these.

The app supports the following languages such as Arabic, Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese(S), Chinese(T), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hmong Daw, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Quer’etaro Otomi, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh, and Yucatec Maya.

While the Apple Watch only offers the speak-to-translate option. The speak-to-translate supports about 30 of these 50 languages listed. Google Translate is similar, in that it does not currently offer the speak-to-translate function in all of the supported text-to-translate options.

Microsoft has already been serving up language translation via its Bing website along with apps for its Windows Phone mobile operating system and its Windows 10 desktop software. Microsoft also provides translation through its Skype Translator program, which will become a part of the Skype app itself soon. However, this is the first expansion of Microsoft’s translation app to the world of iOS and Android mobile devices and smart watches.