You open WhatsApp. Someone texts you in Hebrew. You want to reply properly, not in English, not with a clumsy auto-translation paste. You want to text like you would if Hebrew came naturally to you.
So you do what most people do. You open Google Translate, type your message, copy the result, switch back to WhatsApp, paste it, and send. Your friend replies in three seconds. You spend forty-five seconds on that reply.
That's the real cost. Not one message. Every message.
There's a second problem most people discover later: the Hebrew comes out in the wrong gender. Hebrew verbs and adjectives change form depending on who's speaking. “I'm tired” is אני עייף for a man and אני עייפה for a woman. Translation apps don't know which one you are, so they guess. They guess wrong about half the time. You send the message anyway, your Israeli contact notices, and it's a little off. Not catastrophic. Just not you.
There are Hebrew keyboards on the App Store that solve a different problem: they let you type Hebrew characters directly. Useful if you already know Hebrew. Not useful if you think in English and want to send Hebrew.
The translator apps solve the language gap but add the copy-paste detour, guess your gender, and send your text to a server to do it.
Bridgi is an iOS keyboard. You install it once, set it up in about a minute, and it lives in your keyboard row alongside your regular keyboard.
In WhatsApp or any other app, tap the globe key to switch to Bridgi. Type your message in English, the way you'd naturally say it. Tap Translate. Bridgi replaces your English with Hebrew, right there in the text field. Tap send.
You never left the chat.
That's the whole workflow. No app-switch. No copy-paste. No detour.
During setup, you set your own gender once. From that point on, every first-person translation uses the right form automatically. אני עייפה if you're a woman. אני עייף if you're a man. You don't choose a gender context per message; you set it once and it holds.
This matters more than it sounds. If you text in Hebrew every day and your gender keeps coming out wrong, the messages don't sound like you. They sound like someone else sent them. Getting the gender right is the difference between a translation and a message.
For a deeper read on why Hebrew gender goes wrong in translation and what the grammar actually looks like, this article goes through it.
Bridgi does not need the Full Access permission. Full Access is the iOS setting that lets a keyboard make network connections. Bridgi doesn't make network connections because the translation runs on your phone, inside the keyboard, with no data leaving your device.
That means no server receives your messages. No account. No subscription data trail. No third-party analytics on what you type.
It works offline too. On a plane, in the subway, in a building with bad signal. The model ships inside the app.
An iOS keyboard. English into Hebrew. Gender-correct, set once. On-device, offline, no Full Access required. $5.99, one-time purchase, no subscription.
Version 1 does English to Hebrew. That's the one direction it does well. More language pairs are planned.