alt Hacker NewsI speak native English and barebones high school Spanish. I recently visited Costa Rica and almost every time there was a language barrier issue (unknown word or phrase), the local folks opened ChatGPT, said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.
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When OpenAI starts requiring a payment, or showing an ad before it starts translating, will they continue? Or will they use the Google Translate app, which can do this locally? (Or for that matter Gemini or Grok or whatever?)
> said what they were trying to say in Spanish and then had ChatGPT convert it to English. It was everywhere.
i'm just so surprised they'd use chatgpt to do this, when it's quite as easily (and perhaps faster) to use google translate.
Google Translate has been doing this forever and people in countries like Turkiye have been using it for a while. The usecase you're talking about is not exactly an LLM use case tbh.
It's incredible that google translate had this moat for a decade (maybe more) including live translation but people prefer to use chatgpt now
I have done that at my home. My wife calls maids. They are there. I need to go to restroom. Ask my wife. She is struggling to communicate. It took me 3 seconds to realize ChatGPT could help. And it did.
A cool use case; you can tell ChatGPT voice to act as a translator. When they speak Spanish, translate it to English. When you speak English, translate it to Spanish.
Works pretty good.