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Comment by tucif | Hacker News Reader

I also think the situations where I'd find useful this kind of translations are when I'm not in my home country which most likely means my data plan does not work or is very expensive, which makes it less useful than it sounds at first.

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Sometimes, your home country (or rather, the country where you live) has a different official language(s) than what you are most proficient in. That's the case for me living in Barcelona (catalan and spanish here, where I speak mostly english and swedish).

Also, being able to travel around in europe without any extra roaming charges, means that I can still use this, wherever I go in europe.

I'm very excited to try these as soon as I can get my hands on them.

Your comment is very valid, but in Europe, we can have some data free while travelling in another country. if we had data plan in our home (European) country. E.g. I recently went from Latvia to Finland, and received text from my operator, that my allowance was 3 or 4 gigabytes (vs. unlimited data at home in Latvia). It was plenty for my 4 days stay, for everything - maps, mail, IMs, browsing, and I did all my "voice" calls over Whatsapp. Spent less than 1GB. Translation would fit that package nicely.

Agreed. It would make sense to have an offline mode.

Project Fi does not charge extra for international data use, and it works in 135+ countries.

Many people may not have Fi, which I get, but I get the feeling Google's ideal use case is these headphones paired with a Pixel 2 running on Fi.

Aha, so Google can mine my conversations and my internet usage! Brilliant!

Same thing applies for anyone using T-Mobile (which is the reason why GoogleFI offers this too). I'm not sure EDGE speeds would be great for this use case though!

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