Thursday, April 29, 2010

Well....that could be helpful.


I am hardly ever, ever, never a sucker for commercials.

I would really rather keep that money that they are trying to extract from me in my own pocket thankyouverymuch.

But then yesterday I saw an iphone commerical talking about a new app that translates texts into audio of the designated language.

Hello.

Genius.

Did you know I am not fluent in Mandarin?

This could be incredibly helpful.

"Joey, are you hungry?" Yeah. No idea how to say that in Mandarin but text in English? Well that I can do!

So you can imagine my excitement as I raced to get onto iTunes and with the help of my husband...because I am a technological idiot......he found an app and installed it.

A free app at that.

That does not require an internet connection. I believe this is a good thing.

I've been messing around with it the last few hours. It's great! It's not the text to talk one but it has pre-made phrases that you can just touch and it will speak it out.

Beyond that, the app people have the phrases divided into categories. Greetings, People, Travel Information, Dates, Numbers. How fantastic is that?!

And then there is a category entitiled, "Travel Safety". Well. This could be helpful. Preparedness is key after all....at least that's what the Boy Scouts say.

Under the heading of "Travel Safety" it gives you a list of helpful emergent words. Police, Doctor, Hospital,.... Stop Theif!" I'm sorry, what?

Yep. "Stop Theif!" is on there.

Funny right? Yeah. I thought so too. But if you keep scrolling down you get more intensive travel help. With this


"Don't Shoot!"

and my personal fav



"Those drugs aren't mine!"

And let me just tell ya. If I end up needing to know the phrase, "Those drugs aren't mine!" whilst we are in Ch*na. Something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

I'm off to pack my bullet pr*of vest and unpack my drugs*. Busy day. Busy day.

4 comments:

  1. Wow! You better be careful! :)

    Jim uses something that transcribes voicemails into text. It really doesn't do a very good job, but it's quite funny to see what it "says" I said.

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  2. Do you think it'll work for my family who lives in NJ? Sometimes they are just super hard to understand! ;-)

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  3. That is hillarious! I love that app, very cool and will be very handy...not sure about the travel safety ones!

    Hugs,
    Robin

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  4. I have had a really sucky day but you have made me laugh my butt off! thanks as always girlfriend.
    hahahahaha
    pass on the app. esp cuz its free..
    jill

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