Say something in English and the person across the counter hears it in Spanish, in your own voice. Passport Buddy is a translator for speech, text and whatever you point the camera at, and most of it runs on the iPhone.

Passport Buddy is free to download, but using it requires Passport Buddy Pro, a paid subscription or one-time lifetime purchase made in the app. Every feature described below is part of Pro.

Version 2.0 has five tabs: Translate, Transcribe, Conversation, Camera and Settings.

TRANSLATE (PRO)

The app opens here. Type, paste or speak, and read the translation in large type. Tap to hear it. Save the words you keep looking up and drill them later with flashcards.

YOUR VOICE, THEIR LANGUAGE (PRO)

Read a few sentences aloud. The app builds a voice model from them on the iPhone, and from then on your translations are spoken in your voice instead of a stock one. The recording never leaves the iPhone. The full voice model needs 8 GB of memory (iPhone 15 Pro or later). With less memory, English is spoken in your voice and other languages use a system voice.

FACE-TO-FACE CONVERSATION (PRO)

Pick a language for each side and put the iPhone on the table. Each of you reads the other person's words in your own language while they talk, and every turn is read out loud. It works at a pharmacy counter, a hotel desk, or dinner with your partner's parents.

CAMERA (PRO)

Hold the camera up to a menu or a street sign. The translation sits on top of the original text and stays put while you move. Not sure what you're looking at? Switch to identify mode and the app names the object in both languages. You can also take a photo and translate that.

TRANSCRIBE (PRO)

Press record and read the captions as they arrive: a lecture, an interview, a tour guide. The Lock Screen shows the timer, so the iPhone can sit face down. Recordings stay in a searchable list, and a transcript exports as TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT or JSON.

OFFLINE (PRO)

Download your languages and the offline caption model before you fly. Translation and Transcribe keep working in airplane mode.

WHAT LEAVES THE IPHONE

Most translation, the voice model and offline captions run on the device. There is no account to create.

Three things can go to our server: a photo you translate while online, a camera frame when you tap to identify an object, and text in a language pair the iPhone can't translate by itself. A random install ID goes with them. Your name and your Apple Account do not.

LANGUAGES

Translation between 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Your cloned voice speaks all of them except Ukrainian, which uses a system voice. Offline captions cover all 21. The app's own interface comes in more than 50 languages.

What is available depends on the language, the iPhone and the OS version, and some languages ask for a one-time download first.

PASSPORT BUDDY PRO

Pro is sold in the app as a weekly, monthly or yearly auto-renewable subscription, or as a one-time lifetime purchase. Each plan's price is shown before you buy. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. A subscription renews automatically unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the current period ends, and the renewal is charged within 24 hours of that. Manage or cancel it in Settings, under your name, then Subscriptions.