One of the most intense experiences you’ll ever have is visiting a country that speaks a language different than yours. There’s a host of tools you can use, but Google’s Translate product has leapfrogged just about everything out there over the years.

Its most handy, and impressive, tool is the six-month-old instant translation feature, using the goodies from the acquired Word Lens, that lets you point your camera at something written in another language, say a sign, and it’ll translate into your language with ridiculous accuracy in almost real-time.

Today, that feature is expanding today from seven languages to 27 languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. The update is rolling out over both iOS and Android.

Google’s secret for the speed of instant translations, is its use of convolutional neural networks. It’s pretty rad stuff, and the explanation by Otavio Good, software engineer for Google Translate, is worth the full geeky read.

With some additional tweaks, voice translations are also available much faster, especially for those in spots with 3G or slower speeds.

With tools like these, I wondered if translation tools cause us to rely on the technology without actually learning the language. I liken it to GPS, which has not helped me with learning locations, but has just made me rely on…GPS.

I spoke to Julie Cattiau, product manager at Google Translate, yesterday about the Translate project as a whole, and asked specifically about Translate as an aid, rather than a replacement:

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