Lonely Planet Audio Phrasebooks available for iPhone and iPod touch

Lonely Planet’s Audio Phrasebooks for iPhone and iPod touch are now available for sale on the Apple App Store in all territories, providing travelers with mobile access to Lonely Planet’s phrasebook content in 10 languages.

Chris Boden, Lonely Planet’s director of global business development said, “It’s obvious that travellers are increasingly using technology to enhance their journeys. No matter where you are in the world, with your iPhone or iPod touch and a little help from Lonely Planet, you’ll be conversing like a local!”

Each Audio Phrasebook application includes over 600 spoken (and phonetically written) phrases, covering everything from health (“I’m allergic to antibiotics“) to going out (“Where can I find a pub?“). Applications are currently available for English speakers with phrase translations in Mandarin, Cantonese, Czech, Thai, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Drawing heavily on the intuitive layout of Lonely Planet’s print phrasebooks, the iPhone applications allow users to easily select a relevant phrase category such as Greetings or Eating Out, by simply tapping that category on the iPhone’s touch screen and then flicking through corresponding phrases using the iPhone’s innovative Multi-Touch feature to find the phrase they need. A further tap shows the foreign language translation and plays the audio through the iPhone’s speakers - enabling the phrasebooks to be used as both a translation and learning tool.

Lonely Planet’s phrasebooks cover over 100 languages from Arabic to Zulu, with annual sales of around 1 million copies. The iPhone applications take the company’s paper-based phrasebooks to a new level with the inclusion of spoken audio recorded using native language speakers.

Lonely Planet also plans to provide more language combinations over the next few months, such as French to Mandarin.

2 Comments

soldave at 09:30 AM JST - 28th August

Shouldn't "paid advertisement" be placed at the top of this "story"? You could have downloaded a number of language guides and phrasebooks for years now means this is hardly a revelation.
Nessie at 05:59 PM JST - 29th August

But it's the iPod. When iPod wants print, it gets print.