The all-new app has just arrived for Apple Watch and Android Wear, while a companion app for iPhone and Android also lets you translate right from your phone as well as manage settings.
With the new app, Microsoft is entering into Google territory, which has long offered translation services on the web as well as for iOS and Android.
So how does it stack up?
The app features a clean interface that displays your translated text in an easy-to-read font, so it’s great for showing people whose language you don’t speak. Through voice recognition, a user can speak into the device, and have it output in one of the 50 languages. The latter should be useful in noisy environments, especially since you can take advantage of full-screen “translation cards” to conveniently show others what you want to communicate.
Microsoft’s updated Translator app is available for download from the App Store and the Google Play Store. You’ll also be able to receive notifications that someone has made edits on any of your documents on OneDrive. The company says that the most important data its translation tools need to accurately translate languages on-the-fly is a lot of existing translations – 1 million translations of the same text into two languages, approximately. They’ve announced a whole slew of productivity product updates, this time specifically for wearable and smartwatches, including some for smartwatches running on the Android Wear platform.
A relatively self-explanatory one, it allows email and calendar info on your Apple Watch. You could see your emails, but you couldn’t do anything with them.