Dictionary app Reverso is getting a major update with a focus on voice features. In particular, you can now say a phrase to translate it. This might be particularly useful if you can’t spell a word or when you don’t know anything about a language and you can ask the other person to repeat a phrase to get a translation.
Conversely, when you press the tiny speaker icon, the pronunciation should now be much better and more natural. You can save, annotate and share translations if you want to improve your language skills.
The user interface has been refined and Reverso has a few learning features, such as flashcards, search history, quizzes, phrasebooks and more. Other companies such as Languages.ai provide neat learning tools as well.
Reverso’s key feature remains the same — the app can show you examples of how you’re supposed to use a particular word or phrase in a complete sentence. This is a great way to sound more like a native speaker.
When you’re learning a new language from scratch, having a solid translation dictionary is a great way to expand your vocabulary. But as you get better, you already know most of the words you need. You just want to use them properly and structure your sentence correctly. That’s why you need as many idiomatic examples as you can find.
Eventually, you should be able to use a standard dictionary in a foreign language. But it takes time and many apps don’t address this middle step before you can forget about translation dictionaries altogether. Reverso has scrapped a ton of content from the web, movies, books and official documents to contextualize words as much as possible.
This market is quite competitive. The most popular translation app on the App Store and Play Store is Google Translate. It has gotten better recently and it works in a ton of languages.
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While Google Translate is a useful tool if you want to get a rough translation of a big chunk of text in an unknown foreign language, you shouldn’t be using this app if you’re learning a new language. Google Translate isn’t a dictionary and doesn’t give you all the information you need.
Reverso has been around for many years, and it’s interesting to see that it’s still possible to compete with giants like Google in a specific market.
