SpeechTrans Ultimate for iPhone – Review

Category: Travel
Price: $19.99
TiP Rating: 4/5 stars
Release Date: 04/12/2011
Version: v1.4
Languages: English, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish
Seller: SpeechTrans
Rated: 4+
Requirements: iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch running iOS 3.0 or later

LINK TO APP

App Store Description: Magically Speak and Understand Different Languages within a matter of Seconds with 99% Speech Recognition Accuracy Powered by Nuance! Have you ever met a person you really like but due to the language barrier you wouldn’t be able to start a chat? SpeechTrans is here to help you out!

Summary: To be completely honest, I am not very good at other languages. Spanish just doesn’t come natural for me. Remembering all of the correct structures and words is a nightmare and half of the things I say probably don’t even mean what I think they do. My language troubles aside, I love to travel, but have never ventured to countries where the primary language is not English because of language barriers. Luckily I came across this little app that will do everything for me. I just have to talk, and it translates.

Review: First off, I’d like to say that this app works. In fact it works quite well. It is powered by Nuance, the people behind apps like Dragon Dictation and Dragon Search, so the voice recognition is nearly flawless. I was able to ramble on a long random sentence of maybe 70 words with 80 percent accuracy and shorter sentences of around 10 words with 100 percent accuracy.

SpeechTrans currently has 16 languages including Arabic, Swedish, Japanese, and Spanish. Most of the languages also allow for automatic speech recognition so you can speak instead of type. You can also choose whether the translated voice is a man or a woman if that matters to you. As far as the voices go, they are on the same as the kind of text-to-speech voices you would see on a computer and in my tests they don’t get every word perfectly, pronunciation wise, but a listener would be able to understand most of the words or at least get the gist of a sentence.

Is that an iPhone5?

In the features category, SpeechTrans does pretty well. It offers the ability to post translations to Facebook, Twitter, or share them with Bump. They even included a neat feature that lets users chat with FB contacts and translate their conversation into their friend’s native language. Also, when they type, it translates it back as well as speaks it. SpeechTrans also has a translation history so if you use something often, it will be saved and you can just go it quickly. This also works if you are in a hurry; for instance if your foreign exchange student is about to get hit by a bus, you just press a pre-translated “look out” and it will play it, thus saving him. Lastly, the app also has alternate translations, so you can select what meaning of the word you want it to use and it will translate it accordingly.

Speech Trans FB chat

The only reason I took off a star is because of the UI. It is seriously in need of an update to take it to the age of iOS4/5. I mean, everything is fairly simply organized and not confusing, but the app is not optimized for the Retina display. If they just did a complete overall to bring it up to date, then the app would be fully worth the price.
Overall, I am pleased with SpeechTrans Ultimate. It quickly and correctly translates speech even when you are wearing a retainer (Major speech impediment sometimes) and knocks down language barriers. This is the perfect travel companion especially if languages are not your forte. There is no doubt that with an updated interface, this could easily be one the best translation apps on the market.