Can anyone recommend a good electronic talking translator?I know there are plenty of type-in-words type ones but want one where one just talks into the device and it says the translated phrase.Would love a cellphone and pda and digital camera and translator in one package.

I'd be amazed if you can get such a device. Would be great!

I remeber years ago trying out the talking dics. I used to type dog, horse,come, and when they were exactly the same I said 'no thanks'. Can you get tonal ones these days?

I've not seen a Thai version, but, I had several years ago a computer program for Spanish. It used voice recognition and if you mispronounced a word it would not allow you to continue until you got it right. I would be very interested if there were on of these availible for Thai.

I would think an Elec translator would cause problems. I used a book and tape package by Linguaphone. I had difficulty hearing the ending of some of the words on the tape and thought some words like 'maak' had a silent 'k' sound. Especially when it would get lost in the proceeding word of 'Khap' or 'Kha'.

So saying to my ma-in-law 'Khoopkhun maa' used to have her frowning at me quite often.

I'd love such a device, but it sounds like an impossible device to work properly, at least without lots of training. I used to use a computer program that I talked into and it typed out my words. Pretty accurate if I was careful, but it took about an hour of reading various passages from some book to get it up to about 90% accuracy... I was transcribing recipes for my website, and it always had problems with "peanuts", as I recall... "Penis" is what got printed. Hope I caught all the errors...

Theoretically, you can train such a program to translate into another language, but you'd need to train every individual word first, for this program... For the 'peanuts' problem, I trained it to type 'peanuts' when I said "booger"