I traveled the world for 6 months, and here's the single best app I couldn't live without

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October 15, 2018 6:56 PM

As Business Insider's international correspondent, I use a ton of different apps to make travel as efficient and seamless as possible. But there's only one that I would be truly lost without, no matter which country I visit.

Hong Kong
China
Singapore
Greece
Israel
Russia

As Business Insider's international correspondent, I've spent the past six months traveling through Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Greece, Israel, and Russia, among other places.

That's a lot of difficult languages to understand. It may surprise you, but I'm only adept at speaking one language: English. That's not for lack of trying — apologies to my high school Italian teacher.

Nothing can substitute true fluency when traveling, but new and improving technologies are getting closer to bridging the gap. It may not be sexy, but Google Translate is the one app I can't live without.

Since it was introduced in 2006, Translate has become an indispensable part of the internet. While many may take to using it to complete their foreign-language homework (again, apologies to my high school Italian teacher), it is integrated into so much of what we do, from Gmail to Chrome and elsewhere. It effortlessly erases borders of understanding as one navigates across the internet from Spanish newspaper to Chinese e-commerce site.

In recent years, Translate's mobile app, which was first released in 2010, has worked a similar magic in the real world. Google has introduced new features designed with travelers in mind and developed unprecedented translation accuracy thanks to Google's game-changing "neural machine translation" technology.

Translate now has more than 500 million monthly users and translates

But that only scratches the surface of the app's potential.

Download Google Translate »

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