Softbank’s Speeek iPhone App Translates Spoken Japanese to English On the Fly

Speeek is an app that can recognise up to 1,500 spoken Japanese phrases and translate them into either English or Chinese. Pocket Babel Fish? Yes please.

This is, of course, only for Japanese speakers, and it only covers basic hello/goodbye/where is the bathroom type phrases, but this doesn’t seem like too far of a leap for Google’s voice search app, which would be pretty exciting. Even if it didn’t read the words back to you–seeing your jibber jabber translated in close to real time into any one of Google Translate’s 34 languages, well, sign me up. The app costs around $US20 in Japan, and the English and Chinese versions are separate. [BBSS (translated) via DVICE]