Star Trek\u2019s Universal Translator can rest easy: Captain Kirk wouldn\u2019t trade it for a pair of AirPods with Live Translation. But for people boldly going where they don\u2019t speak the language, Apple\u2019s digital interpreter is a handy tool.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That\u2019s my takeaway after testing it last weekend in various settings across the San Francisco Bay Area. I chose scenarios that travelers could encounter while abroad: A Spanish-language walking tour, a chat with a French speaker at a festival, and a German film screening.<\/p>\n
What it does well, it does very well. Users can listen to translations as the speaker talks, instead of focusing on a phone screen to read them. That\u2019s more valuable than it sounds, because it lets them stay engaged and focus on the other person, not the tech.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The experience was designed to fit into conversations seamlessly. It didn\u2019t quite live up to that, with some lags, stumbles, and glitches. But, as Apple is quick to point out, <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Star Trek\u2019s Universal Translator can rest easy: Captain Kirk wouldn\u2019t trade it for a pair of AirPods with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65439,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[936,61,60,80,44641,7281,44642],"class_list":["post-65438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-apple","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology","tag-the-prompt","tag-translations","tag-travel-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65438"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65438\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65439"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}