Google Translate will help you improve your rubbish pronunciation

Translation apps like Google Translate are indispensable tools for anyone traveling internationally, helping us to navigate tricky language barriers. Besides just translating your message into a foreign tongue, Translate can also help teach you how to correctly pronounce it. Right now, that only works through listening to recordings — but it looks like it could be about to get a whole lot better.

Run a translation through Google’s app right now, and you’ll see a speaker icon next to all your results that let you listen to a spoken voice sample. We recently saw the app preparing some upgrades here, like implementing a speed control so you could slow down those sample to pick up on their subtleties. That one’s still not live, but now we’re already spotting something much more advanced.

Looking through version 10.10.37.885563132.3-release of Google Translate for Android, we’ve uncovered a new AI-powered “Practice” mode for perfecting your pronunciation. This isn’t yet visible in this release, but we’re able to bring you an early look at how it’s taking shape:

In addition to the “Understand” and “Ask” AI features you currently see with translations, Translate is working to add “Practice,” as well. Tapping that brings up a screen where you can listen to your translation (as well as a few alternatives), and then tap “Pronounce” to take a stab at saying it yourself.

Translate will then listen to your attempt and analyze your performance. In case the voice sample wasn’t clear enough, you can also see a phonetic representation of how the words should sound — and blessedly, in an actually readable format here, instead of something more esoteric like IPA.

You’ll also get an overall assessment of how close to the mark your attempt was, and have the option to try again and refine your approach. If Translate just can’t hear you well enough to make an evaluation (maybe you’re in a noisy environment), it will ask you to give it another shot.

All indications point to this feature being limited to only certain language pairs. For the moment, though, we don’t have a great sense for exactly which might be included there. We got Spanish and English working here, so that’s probably a safe bet, but for the rest you’re just going to have to wait a little bit longer.