Visual translator app Waygo now teaches you how to pronounce Chinese characters

Waygo, a mobile app that instantly translates Chinese characters into English just by hovering a smartphone camera over them, has been updated with a useful feature — it now teaches you how to read the Chinese characters by reflecting the pinyin, along with the English translation of the text.

This latest feature would be helpful for any tourists trying to order their food by pronouncing items to the wait staff, as Waygo seeks to boost its stickiness among tourists traveling in Chinese-speaking countries.

Version 3.0 of Waygo also gets a design overhaul, resulting in a much cleaner user interface now. Its multi-line translation feature has been updated with a tab on the bottom of the translation target box too.

More fonts are now supported on Waygo and you can tap the screen to focus on the image for a more accurate translation — though shaky hands on a device can still hinder the work that Waygo does, an inconvenience that will hopefully be addressed further down the road.

The translation engine was also updated to include more dictionary items, Waygo says, but travel phrases are still its main focus and not complicated lines on, for example, an instruction manual.

A Waygo trial gives you 10 free translations a day, but to get unlimited translations you need to fork out $6.99.

In July, Waygo received $900,000 in a seed round of funding as it sought to expand its supported languages and move beyond iOS — but we’re still waiting on those updates.

➤ Waygo | iOS

Headline image via Lee Yiu Tung / Shutterstock

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