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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Let me know what you guys think!