
TranslateQuick - BananaKick
https://translatequick.com/
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BananaKick
Hi guys. Have you ever traveled in Latin America and had locals send you voice
messages in Spanish in WhatsApp? If you don't speak Spanish, this can be
extremely frustrating because you can't use Google Translate for these voice
messages. I built TranslateQuick as a service to help solve this problem. You
can forward your Spanish voice messages to us in WhatsApp, and we'll send you
the English translation.

Problem I travel quite a bit in South America and I've noticed that most
locals prefer to send voice messages rather than sending the message in text
form . I don't understand why they prefer voice messages to text form, but I
found that it can be frustrating for foreigners who don't speak Spanish as
they can't copy and paste the message into Google Translate for translation.

You can try using the voice recorder function in Google Translate, but the
problem is that Spanish has various accents and slangs depending on the region
and country. Also, Google Translate tends to be more accurate when you enter
in what you want translated in grammatically correct form. Most people don't
speak like this on a day to day basis.

Solution I got the idea thanks to a friend who always sends me voice messages
to translate. I thought that maybe this problem can be solved if travelers had
a WhatsApp number that they can forward their voice messages to, and the
person operating that WhatsApp number can listen to the forwarded voice
message and send back the translation of the voice message from Spanish to
English.

I built a basic web app that handles sign ups and assigns a number of a
translator to the users. Users can add that WhatsApp number to his/her phone
and can forward any Spanish voice messages received in WhatsApp to this
number. The translator will then receive the message, listen to it, and send
back the English translation.

Status The service is live and operational. I thought about building a mobile
app for this where the users can share the voice messages through the app, and
I can have a dashboard where translators all over the world can translate the
voice messages as they come through, but that's a lot of upfront work for the
initial launch. I think that will be a better user experience though compared
to signing up through a website and manually adding a WhatsApp number to one's
contact list.

Once I see the user base grow and I'm confident that this is a big enough
problem to solve, I will get to building the mobile apps and the
infrastructure around it to help it scale better.

Let me know what you guys think!

