Traveling abroad? Google Maps can now talk to your taxi driver for you.

When hand gestures don't cut it.
 By 
Sasha Lekach
 on 
Traveling abroad? Google Maps can now talk to your taxi driver for you.
Google Maps for wherever you are. Credit: Nasir Kachroo / NurPhoto via Getty Images

Imagine for a moment you're in a foreign country and tripping over your own tongue to give a cab driver directions they can understand. Sound familiar? Well, Google Maps is ready and willing to help.

Starting Wednesday, a new Google Maps translation feature using tech from the company's own Translate app will begin rolling out. You'll notice a new speaker button next to the place name or address of interest on the Google Maps app. Simply tap it and the app will speak the location out loud. Google Maps does this by automatically detecting if the language you normally use in the app isn't the same as the place you're visiting.

Here it is popping up for an English-language app user traveling in Japan:

The new translation feature will be coming to all Google Maps app users on Android and iOS throughout the month.

To start, 50 languages will be supported, but more are coming eventually. Here's the first batch of languages that will be translated:

  • Albanian

  • Arabic

  • Bangla

  • Bosnian

  • Cantonese

  • Catalan

  • Croatian

  • Czech

  • Danish

  • Dutch

  • English

  • Estonian

  • Filipino

  • Finnish

  • Flemish

  • French

  • German

  • Greek

  • Hebrew

  • Hindi

  • Hungarian

  • Indonesian

  • Italian

  • Japanese

  • Javanese

  • Khmer

  • Korean

  • Kurdish

  • Latin

  • Mandarin

  • Nepali

  • Norwegian

  • Polish

  • Portuguese

  • Romanian

  • Russian

  • Serbian

  • Sinhala

  • Slovak

  • Spanish

  • Sudanese

  • Swahili

  • Swedish

  • Tamil

  • Thai

  • Turkish

  • Ukraine

  • Vietnamese

  • Welsh

For deeper conversations beyond directions and location names, Google Maps will now also link you directly to the Google Translate app. Google Maps can only help you so much.

Topics Google

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Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.

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