This service is skinned another way in the Chat app, which presents a two-way conversation system, with your language on one side and your partner\u2019s language on the other, upside-down. There\u2019s no button-pressing in this setup: Each speaker simply talks into a microphone on either side of the handheld, and a translation is both played and displayed in text on their side of the screen. It\u2019s the same concept as the one-click translation, but more hands-free.<\/p>\n
The other major feature is a photo-based translation app, which works exactly as you think it should by snapping a picture of text in a foreign language. The unit supports 40 languages, many with multiple dialects, and boasts support for \u201c93+ accents.\u201d Any of those languages can be translated into any other if you\u2019re online, either via Wi-Fi or connected via a cellular network.<\/p>\n
But the killer feature of the T1 is that you can download offline language packs, which lean on the unit\u2019s AI-powered CPU to translate text when you\u2019re not connected. The device supports 31 offline language pairs, but note that\u2019s not the same as 31 languages. Korean-to-Thai translation is supported, as is Korean-to-Russian, but you can\u2019t translate Thai to Russian unless you\u2019re online. For English, only 10 language pairs are supported, and each combination you wish to use must be downloaded to the device in advance, when you do have a connection.<\/p>\n
Photograph: Chris Null<\/p>\n
Translations are fast\u2014if not quite completed in the 0.2 seconds that Timekettle claims\u2014and accuracy was as good as any standard translator I tested it against. It was a more intuitive way to translate audio than using Google Translate (et al.) on a smartphone, though the Google method seems to be well understood globally these days, mitigating that advantage.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t notice any real difference in quality or speed between online and offline translations across a range of language tests, and many of my text-based translations turned in identical results (perhaps suspiciously so) to what I got with Google Translate. Voiced translations aren\u2019t perfect, as they never are with these devices, but they roughly met the 90 percent accuracy that Timekettle promises. Make sure to run an operating system update (you won\u2019t be prompted to do so; the option is buried in the \u201cSettings\u201d menu) to make the handoff between offline and online modes more seamless.<\/p>\n
Screen Woes<\/p>\n
The only major downside of the device is the screen, which has a sad 540 x 1080-pixel resolution, making it difficult to capture much with the 8-megapixel camera to translate at one time. While I can easily photograph a full screen of text with my cell phone for translation, the T1 was able to parse out only a few lines at a time due to its limited resolution. When I zoomed out, the results were usually wildly inaccurate or wholly illegible. Getting closer to the text was ultimately required to get a proper translation with the T1\u2019s camera.<\/p>\n
Photograph: Chris Mull<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This service is skinned another way in the Chat app, which presents a two-way conversation system, with your…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[49,48,195,208,209,404,61,7830,900],"class_list":{"0":"post-7224","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-gadgets","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-gadgets","11":"tag-review","12":"tag-reviews","13":"tag-shopping","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-translation","16":"tag-travel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}