MEET THE DEVELOPER
Translate With Ease
iTranslate Converse
Real-time voice translator
iTranslate Converse is a 2018 Apple Design Award winner. This award celebrates the creative artistry and technical achievement of developers who set the standard for app design and innovation on Apple platforms.
Depending on how you look at it, Converse was either three months or a decade in the making.
“We’ve been doing translation apps for 10 years—basically since the App Store started,” said Alexander Marktl, CEO of iTranslate and creator of Converse, which translates conversations in real time. The Austrian company released its first app—a text-only translator—back in 2009. Though it was an undeniable hit, Marktl wasn’t satisfied with how it worked.
In the intervening years, iTranslate released several more apps and grew to about 25 full-time employees. More important, it kept developing its technology, branching into visual and voice translation. Eventually, Marktl concluded they needed an app that stripped the process to the essentials—and could be used almost without thinking.
Converse was born shortly after. Simply touch and hold its bright orange screen to translate your conversation into 38 languages and dialects as you speak—even with background noise. Here, Marktl explains how he got the idea, why he thought people would hate it, and why developers shouldn’t strive for a perfect prototype.
What problem were you trying to solve with Converse?
Most of the existing voice translation apps had two buttons: You choose your languages, you start talking, and it tries to detect when you stop. That’s OK, but in a lot of cases, you will be outside and it will be noisy. Those apps will not detect when you stop speaking, because there’s too much background noise. So we came up with the tap-and-hold gesture, like a walkie-talkie.
Then there’s the problem that often you end up interacting with the phone instead of the person. We really wanted to create an experience where you use the entire screen as a button. If you know where the screen is, you know where the button is—you don’t really need to interact with the phone, you just feel it. There’s even a 3D Touch feature where you get haptic feedback. Those two simple tricks created an entirely new experience.
What was your biggest challenge?
Probably the 10 years before! But I’m a big believer that when you do something, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
What turned out to be easier than you expected?
I was surprised by how fast we executed the app. We had all the APIs, so once we had the concept, we completed it in about three months.
At what point did you realize that you could pull this off?
The biggest moment for me was after I had the concept and we made the designs—and I felt how fast it was. Most people within the company were very skeptical of the concept when I introduced it. When they saw the prototype and played around with it, all of a sudden everyone was fully in.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Don’t put a year or more into an app design concept. Even if it doesn’t feel perfect, it’s so rewarding and important to get feedback. Back in 2010 or so, we started an app that was not a translation app. I think it took us two years to create a first version of it, only to realize it didn’t work. Compare that to what we did with Converse.
What’s next for you?
The journey’s not over with a design award. Our company vision is to enable anyone to speak any language. We want the app to work fully offline without internet. We also believe in visual translation very much, especially in combination with augmented reality. I think it’s a great use case for AR.