As I travel the world, I notice these common similarities among travelers:
- Those who can’t speak English or the local language usually follow a tour with a guide who speaks their language.
- For those traveling independently, they mostly travel in two or a group of three, and one person in the group would know enough English to get by.
Now, these usual traits bring a common problem. Tourists can’t join a tour speaking a language they don’t understand. Or, one person in the group has to act as the interpreter.
That is how I got by traveling to Malaysia with my Korean in-laws who don’t understand English. I would speak the local language with the locals, interpreting to English to my wife, and she would in turn translate it to her parents.
What if we could change all that and make tours more accessible to all without the insurmountable language barrier? What if there’s a translation app that is convenient enough for all where the tour guide only needs to speak in their language, and the travelers only need to listen in theirs. Period!
Well, that’s our objective when we developed BiiB. To build a super useful multilingual communication app that makes life better for everyone – one use case at a time.
I hate to sound promotional, but here goes my sales pitch — “BiiB app offers a hands-free mode where someone can use our speech-to-text feature to speak, and the app translates the message into the receiver’s language from text-to-speech without having the receipien’t touching their phones. It’s like a live audio guide!”
So, imagine the typical audio guide we get at museums. They have a specific device for a specific language, which you have to pay for. With the BiiB app, you get a live audio guide on your smartphone and it’s free! But, first of…
What is BiiB App?
BiiB, pronounced “beep,” is an AI-driven messaging application that functions like WhatsApp but it automatically translates messages between users in real-time. It uses advanced AI language models to comprehend slang, typos, abbreviations, imperfect grammar, and idiomatic expressions, making multilingual conversations flow naturally. In fact, you can’t even feel that you’re communicating in a foreign language!
How it Works in Tour Guiding Context
The image below illustrates this point. A tour guide in New Zealand is guiding a bunch of non-English travelers. He or she only needs to create a group chat on the app with all the travelers inside. Each time the guide speaks, their voice is captured by the app and converted to text. The text is then sent to each traveler’s phone and translated into their respective languages. If the hands-free mode is enabled, the app will read the text out aloud automatically.
Best of all, tourists get to ask questions in their own language to the guide. The tour guide can even upload photos and videos to further enhance the tour experience. And here’s the kicker: the travelers do not even need to install the app, if they don’t wish to do so. They can use their web browser. But then, they don’t get to have the hands-free function and can’t save a record of the tour.
TL;DR
Here’s a video demonstration that captures it all. Again, it’s like a live audio guide, except that it can interpret a tour guide’s language into a multitude of languages, all at once and in real-time!
Now, anyone can be a tour guide for any destination without knowing any language. Ok, I need to stop pitching. But sorry, I’m so psyched up about our own app that I can’t stop telling the world about it.