Google is said to be updating its Google Translate app to allow speech to text translation in real time, following a similar move by the Microsoft-owned Skype in December.

According to The New York Times, the updated app “will automatically recognize if someone is speaking a popular language and automatically turn it into written text.”

It’s not clear from the report exactly which languages are defined by Google as “popular languages” but it could be presumed that Spanish, French, German and possibly Mandarin may be in the mix.

Google’s play into on-the-fly speech to text translation differs somewhat from the Skype offering; instead of translating an over the internet phone/ video call, Google Translate will have in-person functionality. For example you’re out shopping in Paris and you don’t know what the person is saying to you, you let them speak into the phone, and bingo! You get an immediate translation of what they’ve said.

Accuracy will likely remain a problem for automated solutions; anyone who has used Google Translate previously can attest that the problem with the machine translation isn’t so much the ability to translate each individual word, but the actual context and grammar around them.

There’s no word on when the new version of the Google Translate app will be available.