Jibbigo iPhone App Can Translate English and Spanish

October 30, 2009 By Dena Cassella

The Jibbigo app just made traveling to Spanish-speaking countries a lot easier for iPhone users.

We may be getting closer to having a Star Trek-style voice translation device—but for now we’ll just have to use Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. Jibbigo is a recently released app which can record a spoken English sentence and translate it into Spanish, and vice-versa. Jibbigo was a collaboration of Mobile Technologies, the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh and Silicon Valley) and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.

The app can only record and translate one sentence at a time and Jibbigo strongly suggests using its bi-directional translation tools on the iPhone 3GS. Older iPhones and the second-gen Touch are limited to unidirectional translation, and operate very slowly. The app is available now for $24.99.

Picture was provided by Engadget.com

Showing 4 comments

jmedic at 3:28pm 20th August 2010 i purchased this app and work in emergency medicine. the app is very usefull but like text to text some things can get lost in transslation. must speak slowly if it is a spanish speaking person and try to be as clear as possible but it works. and was wrth the 24.99
Adela at 12:44pm 22nd April 2010 For a pay for app, this looks pretty nice. That's a lot of money though. And with all the errors in plain text to text translation, I can't even imagine the errors that would come up in voice to text translation. Honestly, I don't trust text to text translation unless I can compare it to other translators. They are always so different! How do you know which one is correct? SpanishDict made a neat page with the top 3 spanish translators on one page, so at least I don't have to go all over the place to compare translations. Oh, and it's free and their mobile version is fantastic. And if you don't have access to the internet while traveling, their app is awesome because it has 2 dictionaries and a talking phrasebook for free that don't have to connect to the internet.
paul at 2:55am 14th December 2009 How accurate is it though? I have a 3gs so hopefully the speed won't be an issue.

Oh, and do you have to be on-line too? I want to use it for travelling so need to be off-line.

Thanks
Mark at 6:34am 6th November 2009 J downloaded this app to my 3g i phone ( and yes it is a little slow) and ooh so cool !!