David's Debbie App

Another little bespoke app I built for myself - this one translates English and German live so I can talk to my sister-in-law.

David Gérouville-Farrell
June 17, 2026
2 min read

Nobody can predict how AI is going to change the way we work. One of the ideas you hear is that, thanks to the Jevons Paradox, as it gets cheaper to do something - coding, say - that won’t wipe out a class of work so much as trigger a surge in demand for it. I’ve felt that surge myself in the little bespoke apps I now build for myself. There was this ridiculous proxy server that makes the modern web readable on my Kindle, and a few other odds and ends since. I thought it might be nice to keep track of them here.

Here’s one I built. It’s called David’s Debbie App.

I built it for a trip to see my sister-in-law. She’s Luxembourgish, she doesn’t speak much English, and I barely speak more than a smattering of German. The app translates live English into German and German into English, with less than half a second of delay, powered by Google’s Gemini 3.5 Live Translate.

On the first screen you get to test each microphone. I’ve got one of these DJI microphone kits that comes with two mics - one pans to the left channel, one pans to the right channel, so it’s easy for the app to tell who’s who.

The DJI mic kit - two transmitters, one for each channel

Testing the two microphones - David on the left channel, Debbie on the right

From there you choose what’s what. You pick which earbud is going to hear which language, so each person wears one AirPod and hears the other person translated into their own ear.

And then you can see in this video what it sounds like in practice.

How amazingly cool is that.