Navigating a foreign country where you don’t speak or read the language can be… interesting.
So Google Maps is adding a new translation feature that lets your phone do the speaking.
Gone are the days of anxiously trying to talk to a taxi driver in Spanglish or accidentally offending a local when asking for directions in broken Italian.
Starting this month, world travelers can tap the new speaker button next to a place name or address and Google Maps will say it out loud.
Need to know more about your destination? Want to thank the Good Samaritan? Hoping to score with a cute passerby? Click “Get more translations” to open the Google Translate app (if you have it installed).
The text-to-speech technology automatically detects what language your phone is using, to determine which places you might need help translating.
If your phone is set to English, for instance, and you’re looking at a place of interest in Tokyo, the speaker icon will appear next to the location’s name and address.
“So you can get a real-time translation,” Google Maps Product Manager Laszlo de Brissac wrote in a blog announcement.
Don’t be too offended if the app tries to help steer you through Paris, when you took four years of high-school French. There does not appear to be a way to turn off certain languages that users may already know.
In that case, just ignore the speaker icon and tu te fais.
The new feature is rolling out this month to Android and iOS users, with support for 50 languages (including Japanese) and more on the way.
More on Geek.com:
- Google Maps Out Thanksgiving
- Google Translate Adds More Languages to Wikipedia Article Editing
- Google Maps Adds Detailed Voice Guidance For Visually Impaired
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