Imagine for a moment you're in a foreign country and tripping over your own tongue to give a cab driver directions they can understand. Sound familiar? Well, Google Maps is ready and willing to help.
Starting Wednesday, a new Google Maps translation feature using tech from the company's own Translate app will begin rolling out. You'll notice a new speaker button next to the place name or address of interest on the Google Maps app. Simply tap it and the app will speak the location out loud. Google Maps does this by automatically detecting if the language you normally use in the app isn't the same as the place you're visiting.
Here it is popping up for an English-language app user traveling in Japan:
The new translation feature will be coming to all Google Maps app users on Android and iOS throughout the month.
SEE ALSO: Crowdsourced traffic is available for more Google Maps usersTo start, 50 languages will be supported, but more are coming eventually. Here's the first batch of languages that will be translated:
Albanian
Arabic
Bangla
Bosnian
Cantonese
Catalan
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
Flemish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish
Latin
Mandarin
Nepali
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Sinhala
Slovak
Spanish
Sudanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tamil
Thai
Turkish
Ukraine
Vietnamese
Welsh
For deeper conversations beyond directions and location names, Google Maps will now also link you directly to the Google Translate app. Google Maps can only help you so much.