Chirp: Offline Translator

Chirp is a translator you talk through, not a keyboard you type into.

Press start once and put the phone down. It listens, works out which of you is speaking, translates what it heard, and says it out loud in the other person's language. Then it does the same in the other direction. Nobody passes a phone back and forth, and nobody holds a button.

IT WORKS WITH NO SIGNAL AT ALL Speech recognition, translation and the spoken voice all run on the phone. Chirp contacts no service of ours at any point, has no account to make, and asks for nothing but the microphone. What is said in front of it stays on it.

TWENTY LANGUAGES Downloaded before you travel: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese. Pick the pair for the trip and take them with you.

RUN IT WITHOUT THE SCREEN Start and stop from the Action button, from Control Centre, from a button on the Lock Screen, or by asking Siri. The Lock Screen shows the last thing each of you said, so the phone can stay on the counter or in a pocket.

READ IT BACK AFTERWARDS Every conversation is kept as text for thirty days and then deleted. Chirp never keeps a recording — the audio is never written to disk at all.

WHAT IT COSTS Twenty conversations free, each as long as you like. A trip pass unlocks fourteen days; one payment unlocks it forever. No subscription, ever.

Chirp runs on iPhone and iPad with iOS 26 or iPadOS 26. It needs a microphone, and one download per language before you leave.