International travelers can put away the pocket bilingual dictionaries. Packaged along with Thursday's glitz announcing Samsung's new Galaxy S 4 smartphone was an instant translator function.
The Galaxy S 4 includes Samsung's "S Translator" feature, which lets you instantly translate your email or text messages, using text or voice translation. The feature can do language translation from both speech-to-text and text-to-speech.
At Thursday's unveiling event in New York City, Samsung executive JK Shin praised the feature on stage saying it will connect users with friends without a language barrier. Later on stage, actors demonstrated a hypothetical English-speaking traveler in China getting directions translated from a man speaking in Chinese.
The S Translator understands nine languages, including French, Latin American Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese (or 10 languages if you include American English). Even if you're without a network connection, there are 3,000 useful sentences embedded in the program, so you won't be left lost in translation.
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It's likely a handy feature for those traveling the world or wanting to decipher a Spanish-speaking pen pal's email. Siri better watch out: Apple's beloved personal assistant still can't natively translate, unless you jailbreak your iPhone or just download a translator app for your iOS device.