iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey Introduce System-Wide Translation, Translate App Expands to iPad

[calstanford]

I love how they split iPadOS from iOS so that they can bring stuff from iOS to iPad a year or more later...

 

[kc9hzn]

With image OCR, text translation, and local speech recognition it really feels like we are getting close to having the Universal Translator from Star Trek.

And what’s more, (with the possible exception of translation, some of that may be cloud based) it’s all done on the phone itself, so it can be used offline. It’s pretty dang impressive what Apple has been able to pull off in the AI space, especially with its privacy stance (whereas Google can just throw more computing clusters at any AI problem it encounters).

 

[subjonas]

Love the translating features that have been coming out!
I remember many years ago trying to help a foreign tourist who didn’t speak a word of English. It was such a helpless situation. Live translation on my phone would have saved the day.

 

[4487549]

I understand many found Mojave stable, but I don't know if it was designed specifically with a focus on "under the hood" improvements. If you go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacOS_version_history and search for "hood", you'll find only two OS's that (at least unofficially) are identified as focusing on the latter: Snow Leopard and and High Sierra.

Likely the reason I didn't have the teething pains you did with HS is because I nearly always wait unit about x.3 or x.4 before installing a new OS. That's not just to allow time for Apple time to straighten out their issues; it's to allow for the app developers to do this as well.

What have you found about the performance of Big Sur vs. Catalina? I know there were a lot of complaints about Catalina, but maybe all the significant issues were fixed by 10.15.7.

I waited until 10.15.7 Supplemental Update 2, and have had no issues.

 

[Luke MacWalker]

Does anyone remember, years ago, that Google had an augmented reality app for the iPhone that would change the language of any text in the field of view? It was darned impressive if you held it up to a menu board in the street or hovered over a newspaper, to see it magically change into a different language. I think they ditched it after a year or two, sadly.

They still have it: Google Translate
It works rather well, however the AR is not really useful if you don't pause the video: the translation is always changing, often dramatically so. It's OK when there are just a (very) few words though.