Here’s a scenario – you find yourself in Rome after a week long party across Europe that has left you lost and alone. You can book a room for the night, but you don’t know any Italian. Good thing you have your Windows Phone on your person with an updated Bing Translator app.

Bing announced on Wednesday that it has updated its Bing Translator App with a new speech input function. The new feature allows you to speak into the mic of your phone and have the phone instantly translate what you said into the language of the locals. It will even play back the translated words in a native accent. Of course, this works in reverse as well for when you need to know what the other person in saying.

Here’s what it will look like:

On top of speech input, the Bing Translator App can now translate the printed word. It works in both portrait and landscape mode. You just need to scan the text and the app will automatically translate it.

The final update is exclusively for Windows Phone 8 and it lets users download language packs for offline use. You never know when you’ll be stuck in Italy without an Internet connection so it’s probably best to download the language pack directly to your phone today.

You can grab the latest Bing Translator app for Windows Phone 8 here and Windows 8.1 here.

Image via Windows Store