Passport Buddy: a translator for speech, text and your camera
Say something in English and the person across the counter hears it in Spanish, in your own voice. Passport Buddy is a translator for speech, text and whatever you point the camera at, and most of it runs on the iPhone.
Download Passport Buddy on the App Store
What it does
- Translate: type, paste or speak and read the translation in large type. Save words and drill them with flashcards.
- Your voice, their language: translations are spoken in a voice model built on your iPhone from a few sentences you read aloud.
- Face-to-face conversation: pick a language for each side and put the iPhone on the table. Every turn is read out loud.
- Camera: hold it up to a menu or a street sign and the translation sits on top of the original text. Identify mode names an object in both languages.
- Transcribe: live captions for a lecture, an interview or a tour. Export as TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT or JSON.
- Offline: download your languages before you fly.
How it works
- Install the app and choose your languages.
- Speak, type or point the camera at the text.
- Read the translation or hear it spoken.
Pricing
Passport Buddy is free to download, but using it requires Passport Buddy Pro. Pro is a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription, or a one-time lifetime purchase, made in the app. Each plan's price is shown before you buy.
Questions
What is Passport Buddy?
Passport Buddy is an iPhone translator for speech, text and whatever you point the camera at. Most of the translation runs on the iPhone.
Does Passport Buddy work offline?
Yes, with Pro. Download your languages and the offline caption model before you fly, and Translate and Transcribe keep working in airplane mode.
How many languages does it support?
Translation between 21 languages, including Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. The app's own interface comes in more than 50 languages.
Is Passport Buddy free?
It is free to download, but using it requires Passport Buddy Pro. Pro is sold in the app as a weekly, monthly or yearly subscription, or as a one-time lifetime purchase. The price of each plan is shown before you buy.
What leaves my iPhone?
Most translation, the voice model and offline captions run on the device, and there is no account to create. Three things can go to our server: a photo you translate while online, a camera frame when you tap to identify an object, and text in a language pair the iPhone cannot translate by itself.
Can it speak in my own voice?
Yes, with Pro. Read a few sentences aloud and the app builds a voice model on the iPhone, so translations are spoken in your voice. The recording never leaves the iPhone. The full voice model needs 8 GB of memory (iPhone 15 Pro or later).