A few weeks ago Small Dog sent me to Key West to help with the Small Dog team in the southern most point. While I was there I met this wonderful Chilean. One problem though is that we do not speak the same language. She was raised speaking Spanish, English for me. Thanks to our quick thinking we were able to communicate via translators built into a few different apps. She was using an iPhone 6 with the Whatsapp app. I was using an iPhone 5s with google translate, and with a lot of patience, we were able to hold a conversation strictly relying on our iPhones.
After I left Key West and went back to Vermont and her to Chile, we kept in contact via translators over Facebook. Until I realized that Skype had a translator built into the app, One problem it is Windows only! (Boo, Skype, Boo!). Lucky for me I already had the best windows laptop you can buy…a MacBook Pro!
So I partitioned my drive and now Running Windows 7 and OS X, which lasted about a week before going back to just OS X. Now the setup I use is Skype running on MacOS 10.12 with google translate.
The cool thing about Google Translate is that it has a speak option. So you type into one box and in the other box it would translate to Spanish, then just click on the sound button and google will speak in the language you translated to with a cool robot voice. The only problem that I have found with Google Translate is that they are not good with slang. I learned I use a lot of slang.
Reflecting back on this whole scenario it amazes me that we are in a time of such great tech(slang), and we do not use it to its full potential.