Translation books and even phone applications can only carry you so far, as it has become tedious work trying to use them to navigate exactly what you’re looking for. However, Google has just released an epic update to their Translate for Android app on its one year anniversary. What’s epic about it? Conversation Mode.

What’s New With Google Translate?

As reported by Tech Crunch, most of the updates to that app pertain to the user interface, but Converstion Mode, while only in alpha, is very impressive.

It works exactly how you’d think it would, in a perfect world. You speak in one language into your phone, the app translates it for you, and it outputs the translation through your phone’s speaker. The person also has the opportunity to respond back into the phone, repeating the process from the other end.

To see this in action, here is a YouTube video of Google demoing the app on stage, taken from a conference in Berlin back in September. The demo starts roughly 26 mins & 24 seconds in:

More information about the update can be found on Google’s Mobile Blog. You can download the app on your Android device by using the bar scanner app to scan this QR Code:

Conclusion

The fact that this exists is amazing. As Google notes, the app is still in the very early stages, as they’ve experienced a few issues with background noise, accents, and other things you might expect, but all in all it looks like very good progress. I’m curious to see how this will wind up.

What do you think of the new Google Translate?

[Note]: Currently, the app only works in English and Spanish (sorry, rest of the world!)

Source: Tech Crunch

That said, there are some languages, such as French, where the translation is much more accurate. The translations can’t necessarily be trusted as being perfect, and often with languages where dialect or formal speech is an issue, Google Translate usually tends to get it wrong. The Google service still does come in pretty handy when translating emails, forum messages or even entire websites. But that’s not all that Google Translate is good for. You can push the limits of this tiny Google service and you’d be surprised at what you can get in return.

Beatbox

One of the most fun things to do with Google Translate to date has to be turning it into a beatbox. First posted on Reddit, the hidden feature that Google themselves probably never even imagined is making the internet rounds.

Paste the following text into Google Translate:

pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpvpvzk kkkkk bsch

Select German to German translation, and press Beatbox. Google has clearly embraced this discovery, replacing the Listen button with a Beatbox button.

For the ‘Techno’ version, select Chinese to Chinese Simplified/Traditional translation.

Create Sound Effects

Once beatboxing was discovered, it wasn’t long before people were trying to find other interesting sounds you can get out of Google Translate.

To simulate the sound of a machine, an old car, or possibly even a chainsaw, paste the following text into Google translate and select Croatian to Croatian translation.

rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

To simulate the sound of a helicopter, the following text has been suggested when selecting German to German translation.

kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Order Indian Food

According to Google’s Demo Slam, a website inviting people to demonstrate how they put Google’s services to use in their lives, two American girls were able to call an Indian restaurant and place their order in Hindi. Whether or not the video is genuine is something we’ll never know, but with a little knowledge of the language, it might just be possible.

Translate Twitter Messages Automatically

With the use of the awesome Firefox add-on Greasemonkey, and a little userscript, you can have any foreign language tweets on Twitter automatically translated from whichever language they were originally written in. This is something that is actually currently being rolled out to all Twitter accounts, but until then, Firefox users can benefit from the free work around.

The script has its quirks, and sometimes translates English tweets if they contain a name that can be mistaken for a foreign language.

Chat with Friends in Any Language

Using the Google Talk chat bots you can have any text instantly translated when using Google Talk. There are two methods you can use – either add the bot to your friend’s list and simply type the text you want translated in a chat conversation with the bota.

Even more conveniently, you can add the bot to your conversation, to have all text translated immediately as you chat.

What creative uses for Google Translate can you come up with? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: Shutterstock

Google Translate is a tool that we really appreciate here at MakeUseOf.  Simon offered four reasons why it’s better than other translation services, and Ann recently covered some tools that are built upon the Google Translate utility.

With most tools that are available online, many people like to have a desktop equivalent – something you can install locally on your PC or laptop that does the same thing. With that in mind, I would like to introduce you to the Google Translate Client.

The Google Translate Application

This locally installed application is called a “client” because in the background it plugs into the Google Translate service to perform all translations. What having a client installed does for you is that it allows you to always have a window available (in the foreground or background) that you can use to translate text whenever you like.

Even if you’re using applications where this client isn’t integrated into it, you can quickly copy the foreign language from that application (such as your favorite email client), and then paste it into this translation window.

You can set the application to auto-detect the source language so that you don’t have to fiddle with settings, and you can set the default target language. In this case I’ve set it to AutoDetect and translate everything to English.

If you’re absolutely obsessed with languages and learning them, you have to try out clicking on the “Learner” button, which opens up the Learner tool. This simply displays simple phrases in your native language, and the resulting text that you’ve selected in the “translate to:” box for cases where the source is English (or whatever you’ve set your default language to).

This feature – the ability to tell the app what to do if the text you’ve copied is actually your default language – allows you to use this client for a dual purpose. Obviously, you can use it to translate any language to your native tongue, but you can also use it as a tool to learn a new language. If you copy text from the web that is already written in your native language and paste it into the tool, it’ll tell you how to translate it to another language. This is fantastic if you’re a language student and want to practice reading web pages in another language.

As you can see on the settings screen, the app is highly configurable. For example, you can change font sizes, colors, start-up and hot keys.

Using The Client In Firefox Or IE

The real beauty of this app is when it is integrated with the application you’re using. While you could always copy text, go to the Google Translate website in a new tab, and then paste the text for a translation – why go through all of those steps? When you have the client installed, all you have to do is highlight the text that’s in a foreign language, and a “G” icon will immediately appear.

Click the “G” – and you will see a pop-up box with an instant translation of that text to your default language.

No more copy/paste and no more opening up a new browser window or tab – everything is translated right on-page. Another cool feature is that when you highlight a word or phrase in your native language, you’ll see three icons pop up.

“G” will do the translation to your default foreign language, “W” is a Wikipedia search that isn’t enabled in the free version – but a cool little additional feature of this free client is that “S” will do an instant Google search for the word or phrase you’ve highlighted.

Finally, if you ever come across text or a document in a foreign language and Google Translate either can’t translate it, or does a poor job of it – you can actually hire a human translator directly from the client. In the client app, if you hover your mouse over the image of the woman, you’ll see the current going rate for translated text – just click to request a paid translation.

Google Translate is becoming more and more popular, and I think at some point all of us eventually end up using the online version. If you tend to use it a lot – give this desktop client a roll and see if it saves you some time.

Do you know of any other cool Google Translate desktop tools? Do you use any other non-Google free translation tools on your computer? Share your insight in the comments section below.

Image credit: Yaroslav B

This post looks at various tools (desktop, browser-based and beyond) that make accessing and translating with Google Translate easier and fun.

Browser-Based Google Translate Tools

The main ways to access Google Translate are of course, provided through a standard web browser.

In terms of official products, there is a multi-browser supported Translate bookmarks, which work by allowing users to select a language, store it as a toolbar bookmark and then use it to auto-translate entire pages on demand with a simple click. Besides, Google Translate is a built-in feature inside Google Toolbar:

Unfortunately, the toolbar can prove to be a bit of a hassle for people who are looking for simple tools to help with international browsing. Sadly (and surprisingly), none of the official tools provides a worthy language auto-detect feature.

If you want something that’s a little more flexible, it may be worth trying out one of the following translation addons for the Firefox browser. The best option is an add-on called gTranslate, this is a great piece of software that allows users to translate any highlighted paragraphs of text from a specific web-page. It automatically identifies the language being used in the text and provides a translation based on the language preferences set up in the user’s browser, whilst providing the option to translate into any of the 50 language supported by Google Translate.

Two alternative options for Firefox are My Translator and Easy Google Translate, both of which have similar functionality to gTranslate, although each provides the translations in slightly different ways. My Translator makes the translation available in the context menu, whilst Easy Google Translate displays it as a balloon over the original text (which can be useful when trying to learn a foreign language).

Desktop Based Google Translate Tool

Whilst it isn’t really anything other than a prettier version of the online translation tool, AIRTranslate provides a very clean-looking desktop-based utility which runs off of Adobe Air. Unfortunately (though quite understandably), you still need to be connected to the Internet in order to use it.

As with the Google Translate homepage, you need to manually input (or copy and paste) the text you want to translate into the translation field. The program will then automatically detect the language it’s written in before presenting the user with the option of what language they want it translated into.

Translations appear in the same box that the original content was put in, with the option to revert the text back to the initial language by simply double-clicking on the text.

Gtalk Translation Bots

If you are an active Google Talk user, turning it to a translation tool might be a good idea. All you need to do is to add one of these Google bots (formatted as [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com) to friends and send it the message you want translated.

And which Google Translate tools do you prefer? Please share your thoughts!

But Google Desktop isn’t just a novelty. There are many gadgets available for Google Desktop which can improve your productivity. This guide rounds up the top five productivity-improving gadgets you can find for Google Desktop.

To best way to add these Google Desktop gadgets is to simply to right-click on your Google Desktop sidebar and then click Add Gadgets. Type the name of the gadget in the upper left hand search field to find it. Then hover over the gadget’s icon and select Add. Google Desktop will handle the rest.

Task List and Time Timer

Having a to-do list can be great, but the old-fashioned method of putting it down on paper isn’t always the best. Paper can be easily lost, and you don’t want to have to stuff a list of things to do in your pocket whenever you travel, do you?

There are quite a few to-do list gadgets available, but the best one is the Task List and Time Timer. This list really serves two functions. The first is to keep track of what you have to do today. The second is to keep track of how much time you spend doing it. If you’re someone who is self-employed the timer is an amazing tool, as it keeps you honest about how much time you’re actually spending on work.

Read Feed

News isn’t always a distraction. For many people, it is important to have information as quickly as possible. However, the news gadgets which are provided by many media outlets are very limited in what they can do for you. They’re usually focused on getting you to go to their website rather than presenting news to you clearly.

That is where the Read Feed reader comes in. This simple RSS reader allows you to follow multiple RSS feeds at once. The news is formatted in simple text with basic images and dated, making it easy to read while minimizing its ability to distract you when you’re hard at work.

Gmail Notifier

Adding your Gmail to your Google Desktop can help you answer emails quickly, but displaying your entire Gmail inbox in the Gmail gadget feels a bit clunky. A better, more focused way of responding quickly to emails is to use the Gmail Notifer.

Rather than displaying your entire inbox, the Gmail Notifier only displays unread messages. It displays them in a large, easy to click read format. Your can either read a summary of the email or open Gmail in your default web browser to reply.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is an amazing tool for all of use who can’t seem to remember meetings, birthdays and other important dates. The Google Calendar gadget goes even further by making it easy to access your Google Calendar information from your desktop.

Any date on which you have something scheduled will be show up in bold text on your Google Calender gadget. You can then click on the date to read a summary of what is scheduled for that day. You can also create a new event from the Google Calender Gadget or double-click on a date to open up Google Calender in your default web browser and display an expanded view of the day’s events.

Google Translate

The ability to connect with others across the globe online means you’ll inevitably come across situations where you want to read something which isn’t in a language you speak. Finding a website which will translate the text for you is one way to go about it, but if you find yourself running into this problem frequently you’ll find it much easier to use Google Translate, a Google Desktop gadget which will translate text for you once you enter it.

Google Translate can translate supports numerous languages. This includes widely known languages, like English, Chinese and Spanish, as well as less well known languages like Cherokee and Icelandic. Simply type in or copy and paste the text you need translated and Google Translate will handle the rest.

Spellchecker

Ever want to know how a word is spelled as quick as you can snap your fingers? Usually you’d have to open Word in such a situation, or you might just type your suspected spelling into Google and see what you end up with, hoping that the Internet steers you true.

With the Spellchecker Gadget, however, you have no reason to doubt. This simple gadget allows you to enter a word. Press Enter and the word is checked for spelling errors and corrected if there are any. You’ll also receive a quick definition below the word.

On-Screen Ruler

If you work with web designs or photographs you’ll often need to measure an image of a size of page element. However, this can be difficult, particularly if importing the item you’re working on into your favorite editor is, for whatever reason, not possible.

The On-Screen Ruler can solve this problem. It is very simply a ruler which appears on your desktop and can measure the size of an image in pixels. By default it is 500 pixels wide, but it can be adjusted to be as wide or as narrow as needed.

How do you use Google Desktop? Any more productivity gadgets you’d like to recommend? Voice them out in the comments.

The first day started with me hunting for a decent replacement for Gmail. I knew the task wouldn’t be easy. Gmail, after all, does offer a whole load of awesome features. After tons of digging through a gazillion search engines, directories and forums; I finally decided to settle for Zoho Mail. It’s snappy, “offers ample storage for your emails”, POP access, threading, labelling (folders also an option), a good anti-spam system, and even Offline access. IMAP is also supported, but not out of the box.

IMAP support is a private beta, but you can easily get in by dropping a request on the support forums. The devs generally approve IMAP requests very quickly. I made the switch, and although I get hit by Gmail nostalgia every now and then, I’m pretty happy with Zoho Mail.

Day two dawned, and I wanted an alternative for Google Calendar (I tend to be quite the lazy dog on most days). I was actually surprised with the number of options that I had. However, I didn’t want a plain-vanilla, zero-fun calendar, and finally decided to settle for Mixin.

Mixin does a really good job of making event scheduling a more social activity. You can post to Mixin using your calendar application, SMS, email, IM, and wait for it”¦ Twitter! Once you’ve uploaded your agenda, you can head over to the Twitter-esque interface and compare your agenda with those of your friends and colleagues, collaborate agendas and make plans to rock your day!

By day three, I wanted to ditch my time-tested and oh-so-reliable Google Search. I shed a tear as I went looking for a fresh search experience. I didn’t want to stick with the giants (Bing, Yahoo!, etc.), and after much mouse-bashing and keyboard-whacking, I came across Kartoo. It’s a metasearch engine with a new take on how results should be displayed. There’s the traditional row list of results and you can also switch to a columnar view.

But it was the third view which provided me with great value. You can actually look at the results as a map of websites. The websites themselves are linked by additional keywords. These keywords can be clicked to broaden/narrow your search. I was surprised at how relevant the results were.

Google Wave has lately taken the world by storm. And it was exactly for this reason that I was itching to find a worthy alternative for Google Wave. I stumbled upon Scribblar. It basically aims to be a real-time whiteboard. It includes most of what Wave lets you do, and does it, IMHO, more efficiently than Wave. I almost used up an entire day loving Scribblar.

Being a blogger, I admonished myself for not having found a good news reader yet. Hence, I spent the fifth day looking for a good replacement for Google Reader. Amongst the web-based readers, nothing really matched up to Google Reader (apart from, maybe, Netvibes Wasabi). But I did come across a very powerful desktop reader. It’s a free, cross-platform client called BlogBridge. It requires the Java Runtime Environment to run and supports OPML import/export, tagging and pinning individual news items, apart from the usual set of reader features.

I also needed a good Docs and Spreadsheet alternative and came across EyeOS Public Server, which is actually an entire browser-based OS and contains a decent document and spreadsheet editor.

For my location hunting needs, I fixed my crosshairs upon Map24, a service by Navteq. The whole interface was slightly too cluttered for my liking, but I totally liked the functionality it provided. At times I couldn’t pick between Google Maps and Map24. Points of Interests are called “Channels” and can be dynamically added to/removed from the maps. The only downside to Map24 is that it has a bit of a bias towards the detail in which UK, and Europe are covered.

To round up my search for alternatives, I wanted something with which to replace Google Image Search. I found a pretty neat service, PicFindr, which let me query close to ten websites for free stock images. However, I did get the feeling that the interface wasn’t very sleek and left a lot to be desired.

Then there was Free-Translator (to replace Google Translate), which did a pretty OK job of translating blocks of texts, as well as websites into the usual languages.

I also found a pretty cool replacement for Google Notebook (I’m an information-junkie and keep snipping things to share with the world). While Evernote works for me perfectly, I came across something that is absolutely brilliant in its simplicity. Justpaste.It encourages you to do exactly what the name suggests. Once you have pasted your info, it hands you a URL which lets you share your snippets with the world.

By the end of the seventh day, I had settled down into my new online routine. One, where getting my work done didn’t involve going to a Google subdomain. I could happily email, search, collaborate and organise, not really missing the Google life that I’d clung to for many, many years. Sure, the occasional twinge of nostalgia hit me pretty hard, but I’d moved on from being a Googaholic!

What are your favourite alternatives to Google’s services? Could YOU live without Google?