The search giant's Translate app can now help you have an almost natural conversation with someone even if you don't speak the same language.
Google has launched a live translation tool that can take spoken audio in one language and convert it into a synthesised voice speaking a second language in real-time.
The ability will roll-out to Android and iOS phone apps “over the next few days”.
The app can translate between 80 different languages and does not need an active internet connection.
Google's Barak Turovsky wrote in a blog post: "When talking with someone in an unfamiliar language, conversations can... get... realllllllly... sloowwww.
"Starting today, simply tap the mic to start speaking in a selected language, then tap the mic again, and the Google Translate app will automatically recognise which of the two languages are being spoken, letting you have a more fluid conversation.
"For the rest of the conversation, you won’t need to tap the mic again—it'll be ready as you need it. Asking for directions to the Rive Gauche, ordering bacalhau in Lisbon, or chatting with your grandmother in her native Spanish just got a lot faster."
Skype, which is now owned by Microsoft, beat Google to the announcement by just a few weeks when it announced that it would be launching new software to convert between spoken English and Spanish. While it does not offer the same breadth of languages that the Google app is said to be preparing, it is already being tested by the public.
Skype Translator Preview only works on desktop computers and is currently in a limited testing programme. The company says it “gives you the ability to speak another language without learning one” and that more languages will be supported soon.
Google claims that it has 500m active users of its Translate service across the various platforms that it is offered on.
The majority of the internet is reasonably straightforward to translate once you have a small number of languages working: Google estimates that as much as 90 per cent of the internet is in just ten languages.