EarthChat

A chat app with real-time universal language translations

2 followers

EarthChat was made to help my families communicate with each other. You see, my family speaks Mandarin and my husband's family speaks English. Now my families are getting to know each other using EarthChat's real-time translations! I hope this app will help others as it helped me. It supports 100+ languages and is free today for PH users.

Launch tags:

iOS•Messaging•Artificial Intelligence

Launch Team

Shannonize

EarthChat

Maker

Hi Product Hunters, EarthChat was made to connect my Mandarin-speaking family who live in China with my new English speaking one in the United States. You see I am from China and I married an American. He speaks English, but my family does not. I was sad that my husband would not be able to get to know my family. EarthChat removed the language barrier so that my new families could get to know each other. Now my husband chats with my family as naturally as he messages with me! My mother-in-law and Chinese mother are even getting to know each other thanks to EarthChat. How does it work? It’s incredibly simple, the translations occur automatically; you don’t have to do anything. You will see everything in English, or whatever language you are most comfortable with, as will any other user. For example, if a user’s native tongue is Spanish, they will set their language settings to “Spanish,” and any conversation they have will be instantly translated into Spanish. They can have a natural conversation with someone who speaks Russian, and their phone will have the dialogue in Spanish, and the Russian user will see the discussion in Russian. I hope this app will help others just like it helped my family and me. EarthChat is available in over 100 languages. It's free today for Product Hunt users.

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7yr ago

Ryan Hoover

Product Hunt

Cool story behind the app, @shannonvids. How do you think about managing cultural differences in communication beyond simply translating words as much of the way we communicate is rooted in context and subtle differences? cc @staringispolite

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7yr ago

Shannonize

EarthChat

Maker

@staringispolite @rrhoover Thanks Ryan, I've been lucky to meet a lot of people from all over the world. In my experience, people are similar overall no matter where we are from. I hope that people can meet and start to understand different cultures. We can learn a lot from each other.

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7yr ago

Jonathan Howard

CryptoPoops

@rrhoover @shannonvids Ryan's actually addressing a different point we've chatted about offline. I've thought a lot about this, being an exchange student in France, in a bilingual relationship now, and building a "universal translator" feature into a now-defunct chat app called Bebo at a hack-a-thon. Here's a concrete example: if you translate the WORDS from someone in Mexico telling me "venimos ahorita" you'd translate it as something like "we're coming soon". But you don't translate the complex cultural meanings of ahorita (anywhere from "right now" soon, to "later" soon, to "some time, I don't know"). Without cultural understanding, there is literally no way to resolve this class of problems through two-way translation. This applies to everything from single word definitions (improvable if you include drop-downs for alt translations a la Duolingo), to broad cultural expectations. That said: baseline translation is a huge step in the right direction. Understanding different cultures is impossible without at least that. From there, people can start learning ("you said you'd be here soon, where are you?", "what, no I didn't!", "??", "OHHHH I said ahorita but it probably showed you soon", "ahorita doesn't mean soon??" -- and keep in mind the translator might turn that into "soon doesn't mean soon??" which makes it even harder to resolve the miscommunication). Fun times.

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7yr ago