Tara Can Now See, Speak and Show You the Way

8 Sep 2026 Carol 3 min read

Ecosystem Updates

Upgrade: Tara Can Now See, Speak and Show You the Way

Your travel assistant just gained maps and directions, live translation, a camera that reads menus and signs, and a voice you can talk to with your hands full.

Carol

Community Manager, Tratok

Tara has been able to search and book your travel inside a conversation for a while. This update is about the rest of a trip: the bit where you are standing on a street with a menu you cannot read, trying to work out which way the museum is.

Point your camera at it. Ask out loud. Tara answers in your language and puts it on a map.

Four new things Tara can do

Show you where it is

Ask where something is and Tara draws it on a map inside the conversation, with a button through to the full Explore map. No copying an address into another app.

Give you directions

Walking, driving or cycling routes from where you are standing to where you are going. Share your location once and Tara works from there, without ever storing it.

Find what is near you

Pharmacies, cash machines, a park, a viewpoint. Ask for what is nearby and Tara looks around your actual position rather than guessing from a city name.

Read and translate anything, including photographs

Type or paste text for a translation, or point your camera at a menu, a sign, a timetable or a ticket machine and ask what it says. Non-Latin scripts also come back written out the way they sound, so you can attempt the word out loud.

And you can now talk to her

There is a microphone button and a read-aloud toggle in the Tara conversation. Turn read-aloud on, ask your question out loud, and Tara speaks the answer back. Turn by turn, hands free, which is the only sensible way to use an assistant while carrying luggage in the rain.

What that looks like on a real day

Dinner

The menu is entirely in Greek

Photograph it and ask what is on it. You get the dishes explained in your own language, with the original alongside, so you can point at the right line when the waiter comes back. Prices stay exactly as printed, in the local currency, because converting them would be actively unhelpful.

Getting there

A twenty minute walk you have not planned

Ask how to get to the harbour from here. Tara maps a walking route from your position and shows it in the conversation, and you can open it full screen if you would rather look at it properly.

The unexpected

You need a pharmacy, quickly

Ask what is near you. Tara searches around where you actually are, shows the options on a map, and gives you directions to the one you pick.

About your photographs and your location

This matters, so it is worth saying plainly. Photographs you send Tara are stripped of their embedded camera data, stored outside the public part of the server where no browser can reach them, served only to you, and deleted after seven days. Your location is used for the question you asked and is never stored at all.

Tara lives at the Tara conversation on tratok.net. The camera and location buttons can be easily found next to the message box. Give it a try, you will be impressed.

Keep exploring Tratok

Message Your Host in Any LanguageThe same translation engine, working inside your chats.Introducing GroupsWhere a whole travel circle reads each other in many languages.Setting Up Your Tratok AccountFrom first sign in to a funded wallet.

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