I decided to try Converse as a language learning tool. There are so many times I think of how I could say something in another language but I either don’t know, can’t remember or can’t ask. This solves all that for me and I’m trialing right now but in so many languages I will be able to say ‘Subscribe’!

Too much money has been spent on a classy user interface and not enough on the translation engine. It is very erratic and unreliable. You can repeat the same question 4 times in English and it will translate 3 quite well into Mandarin and the 4th time it will speak complete rubbish in English as it has somehow assumed I was speaking Chinese (which I can’t). I have fought with it for over 2 months to try and get it to work reliably without success. I am native English speaking and my wife is native Chinese. I have tried it on a selection of both our friends and it is just too unreliable. I don’t mean just slightly off or missing a word, it sometimes just comes back with complete senseless rubbish. It’s funny when your with friends but not so funny when you are in a serious business meeting. I have contacted support to help trouble shoot the issues together but they had no interest to work through it. They just said that it couldn’t understand my speech. It also can’t understand my wife and several of our friends. I then asked about a refund and I was instructed to talk to Apple. But seems Apple won’t provide refunds for subscriptions. So looks like I have been well and truely stitched up. Siri does a much better job at translating and does it for free.

My wife and I speak four languages between us, doesn’t matter if we test in English, Polish, Spanish or French it struggles to translate at all well, often confusing the language we are speaking for the language we want it translated to. Reversing the languages is impractical for a conversation, but even by doing so the result is no better, often just trying to give us a gibberish response.I speak to my iphone (currently iPhonex) regularly in English, French and Polish, only rarely do I have to correct my phone’s text interpretation of what I am saying, I am sure this is also correct for my wife who speaks to her iPhone in Polish, English and Spanish. I am not sure why I suddenly have to alter my cadence and pronunciation to use this app so much. How would that even work in the real world explaining to someone of no common language that they are speaking their own language wrong and that my phone does not understand? It’s just too hard to use at the moment.Would cheerfully buy and pay for if it actually worked, but at the moment we can only score this one as a fail. Sorry.