• Laserpeen@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    You must be very young, I’m not trying to start shit. Auto-translation became a semi-functional feature around a decade plus after smart phones existed. At first we just had very basic apps. Look funny and drink beer or see the stars from a GPS location on your phone.

    It’s still not perfect but we’re getting there. Your assumption that apps magically existed and worked is adorable. Progress takes time.

    • I’m Gen Z lol

      Oh lol I just remembered the first smartphone was invented in like 2007 (as in, actual mass market product, not just prototypes), I had my first in 2015, so probably warped worldview lol. Like my parent were still using flip phones in early 2010s and this was also around the time when I first had internet access (didn’t have internet in my neighborhood in my previous country).

      I always forget and thought smartphones were invented in like 2013 or something, since that’s the first time I see one, my aunt had one that I just played with during family gatherings. Pretty sure I remember Google Translate to be an app already.

      But I mean like smartphones paved the way for these tools to exist ubiquitiously, not as in these tools immediately existed upon the invention of smartphones, know what I sayin’?

      • essell@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        If you’re going to end your sentences with “lol” you don’t also need to say that you’re Gen Z. One or the other will do. 😏

        I agree your original point stands, regardless of the timescales involved.

        The invention of the smart phone did make international travel less intimidating, even if some of the functions took a while to appear.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        5 days ago

        Believe it or not the first production smart phone was released by IBM in 1989, it was the bastard lovechild of a DOS PC and a car phone; it could do fax and modem over the phone. Blackberry put out a device you’d call a smart phone (runs an extensible OS with an app ecosystem, multimedia capable, mobile data as we know it today) in 2002. But yes the iPhone arrived in 2007 much to the unhealth of society.

        The original iPhone did not have an app store.

      • 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 days ago

        I once missed a call from my mother on my cell phone because it was getting late…

        I got in trouble due to the fact I didn’t call her back.

        The phone didn’t have caller ID on it… so I had no idea who had called. All it said one 1 missed call.

        Cell phone tech has definitely been a process.

        • I got in trouble once because there was a small earthquake in Brooklyn that made everyone call each other so it clogged up the lines, this was before 5g so the congestion problems were way worse.

          Mom at first thought I broke her phone lol.

          Your comment reminded me of that incident lol

          So every time after that, I’d bring up that incident when ever my parents falsely accuse of doing something wrong

          • 7U5K3N@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 days ago

            Haha that’s a great excuse…

            But mom! Earthquake!!!

            That’s so in line with the dog ate my homework, plausible but not probable.

            Love it. Haha

    • aeronmelon@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The iPhone was released in 2007, and the Google Translate app for iOS and Android had the feature to point the phone’s camera at text to auto-translate it around 2010.

    • CameronDev@programming.dev
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      5 days ago

      Wikipedia has google translate (2006) pre-dating android (2008) by 2 years. Iphone was 2007. It has improved significantly since, but it was pretty good even then. Adequate enough to communicate with foreign language speakers. I used to use it to email a japanese penpal, and while it may not have been perfect, it was understandable even then.

      • Damage@feddit.it
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        5 days ago

        Yeah the problem came with verbal communication, you can’t transcribe a language you don’t understand, and good luck getting a stranger to type sentences on your smartphone (at a time when most people didn’t have one), you mostly got garbage translations. When speech-to-text got good enough for on the spot translation, that was a game changer, but that had to be around 2015 or something.

        That’s assuming you had a connection at all, at the time you paid for connection DURATION, not traffic, so you were offline most of the time. And roaming data had impossible costs.