What you can do in a conversation

Tap a place on the home screen — at the doctor, at home — and Loquela opens that room. The first thing you see is a short list of things you can do. Not a keyboard, not a wall of controls. A few large cards, and never more than six.

The list changes with the room, because what you need at a pharmacy counter is not what you need at your own kitchen table.

The cards

Introduce me — plays a short introduction, so a stranger understands the situation without anyone having to explain it. It does not appear at home, among family or with friends: they already know.

Listen — for when the other person is speaking. See When someone speaks to you.

Type — the keyboard. Write a sentence, press return, and it is spoken aloud.

Phrases — boards of ready-made sentences, one tap each. See Phrases: the words already there.

Prepared — appears only when something has been prepared for this room. See Preparing for an appointment.

What we talked about — a short reminder of what has been said so far in this conversation. It is there to jog a memory mid-conversation, and it is gone when the room is left. It is not a record and cannot be shared, copied or exported.

Two small controls at the top

Read aloud turns speaking on or off for this conversation only. It never changes the setting underneath, so a quiet moment in a waiting room does not silence the app for ever.

The language pair — something like ES → EN — appears when the room crosses two languages. Tapping it switches to speaking one language on both sides, which is what you want when family arrive and everyone is speaking Spanish again.

The line that is always there

Above everything sits a plain reminder that the words are produced by a machine and can be wrong. It does not go away. Anyone in the room who speaks both languages can look at the original, which stays on screen beside every translation.