By Jim Karpen on Fri, 03/18/2011
I can't believe I missed the release of Google Translate (free) last month. Or maybe I assumed it was just another app for text translation. But it is so much cooler than that. It can also do speech recognition, such that you canspeak the phrase or sentences that you want translated, and it will speak back to you the phrase or sentences in the target language. It's fun to play with. When you speak the text, it shows on-screen what it thought you said as well as a text translation. Then if you tap the speaker icon, it speaks the text. If it didn't accurately understand what you said, you can quickly tweak the text, and then it gives you a new translation. It can translate text between 57 languages. The speech recognition feature works for 15 of those. And the speech synthesis feature (in which it speaks the translated text) work for 23 of the languages.