The Windows Phone 8 SDK was publicly available last month so I thought the Translator for Windows Phone could take advantage of some of its new features. The upgrade process took me a few days, mostly because of not been able to work on it for more than an hour or two on each session, but I’m glad to announce it’s finally ready and available for download!

Get the Translator 2.0 here.

Besides all the great new stuff that all Windows Phone 8 apps get for free, these are the two new features that really make a difference for the Translator:

1. Speech Recognition: You can now use the new Speak button to say a word or phrase to the app. It will recognize your spoken text and immediately translate it to the currently selected target language. Cool feature and actually ridiculously easy to implement thanks to the new Speech APIs.

2. Better language support: Many people complained in the past about the Translator not been able to display text in a few languages, been Hindi among the most requested. This was sad because the Translator was actually able to translate the text to those languages but could just not display it in the Windows Phone 7 platform. Gladly, and without having to add a single line of code, the Translator can now display text in Hindi and 20+ new languages!

I hope this helps and please keep sending feedback either from the app itself or via this blog. I’ll do my best to keep improving the app to make it as useful and easy to use as possible.

Julio