Facebook has announced this afternoon that it has acquired Mobile Technologies, a private company that develops speech recognition and machine translation technology. The move reiterates the social network's commitment to its mobile strategy.
Honestly, I hadn't heard of the company before today. But some quick digging shows that Mobile Technologies is behind the popular Jibbigo translation app, which the developers claim is the "world’s first" online/offline speech-to-speech translator...
German developer Sonico Mobile's iTranslate Voice (not to be confused with dozens of App Store apps that have 'itranslate' in their name) has been on the App Store since May 2012, scoring rave reviews and winning the attention of App Store editors who featured the software on multiple occasions.
A little over a year since its debut they totally revamped the app, adding new languages and language facts and an incredible device-to-device AirTranslate feature.
Unlike many other apps that claim to feature quick voice-to-voice translations, iVoice Translate works as advertised and gets the job done, letting you instantly "speak" another language, voice-to-voice...
The rivalry between Apple and Google is arguably one of the biggest in the tech world, maybe even the world in general. The two companies are constantly fighting each other for smartphone and tablet marketshare, and they both have legions of loyal fans.
That's what makes this next story so amusing. A new bug has been discovered in the Google Now and Translate apps that show Apple a bit more love than you'd expect from a rival. Enter the right queries, and both apps will, oddly enough, "praise the iPad."
And the Siri tweaks just keep rolling in. Lingual is one of the first 3rd party extensions for the awesome AssistantExtensions tweak that we covered earlier. It allows you to translate phrases or text into a variety of languages from the comforts of the Siri interface, and it's awesome for language learners and travelers.
It really is amazing what some developers have been able to do in the short period that the iPhone 4S has been jailbroken, and this one is nothing short of spectacular.