by CNNGo staff
It already does everything else, your phone may as well speak for you too.An Android app by Japan's largest mobile services provider NTT DoCoMo claims to allow people to translate their calls almost immediately.
The next time you need to ask for directions to an obscure Hokkaido dairy farm, you can just approach a local and say it in English, and your phone will take care of the rest.
It is the latest smartphone app to launch amongst a bunch of similar programs aiming to allow people to converse freely in any language. And if it works according to plan, travel may have just got less confusing.
Technology like this will potentially usurp the human translation services industry. And, possibly, Pimsleur.
Using DoCoMo's app, called Hanashite Hon'yaku, people speaking in different languages on either end of a phone conversation can almost immediately translate what they are saying to each other.
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