For face-to-face it wasn't great because speech recognition is error prone. Usually I would always type and the person I'm interacting with would speak and if they saw the text was wrong they'd run it again.
For chatting over sms/whatever it was great. Enough to have complex conversations and get to know people that I couldn't possibly communicate with otherwise. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing if you aren't proficient in the local language.
Also your mileage will vary by language. English-Japanese seems to be a pretty good combination. English-Chinese and English-Russian are a lot more flaky.
For chatting over sms/whatever it was great. Enough to have complex conversations and get to know people that I couldn't possibly communicate with otherwise. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than nothing if you aren't proficient in the local language.
Also your mileage will vary by language. English-Japanese seems to be a pretty good combination. English-Chinese and English-Russian are a lot more flaky.