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Introducing Word Lens

questvisual.com

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Re: Introducing Word Lens

#121

Post by bobf »

I work in the translation industry, and the interesting part of this to me is the implementation. Generating the resulting translation image in real time is a unique idea that is probably hard to make work well. OCR on a mobile device without a network connection is not as difficult as you might think (read: it can fairly easily be done on Android with tesseract-ocr, at least). Also, instead of the typical rule-based or statistical machine translation you get on the web, think of translating word-by-word as simply substituting words from a key/value dictionary list.

Having said that, I'm always glad to see interesting translation being developed and getting such a positive reaction on HN. Congratulations to Word Lens on launching!

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#122

Post by johndeweese »

btilly wrote: post #118
mechanical_fish wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this thing can be made to do Chinese or Japanese... even if it does so haltingly , with mistakes... Raise the price. For the love of god. Raise the price. This is much, much more valuable than five bucks. There have been times in life where I'd gladly have paid a dollar per minute for this. And I'm a cheapskate.

Raise the price. For the love of god. Raise the price. Absolutely, read http://bit.ly/bdHKmm to understand why. (Sorry for the shortened URL, the URL recognition software here doesn't understand URLs with apostrophes in here, so it actually is necessary.) Something like this should not be $5.

and we aim to, Dec. 31st. :)

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#124

Post by dholowiski »

mistermann wrote: post #98
johndeweese wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yep, this is a word-for-word translation, because it's fast and it gets the point across. we're working to improve translation quality and finesse, but it's a much harder problem to understand grammar. so, we hope it gives the general meaning, and you can learn to piece it apart.

Word for word is far, far better than nothing. And no network connection required, so awesome. Roaming charges when travelling are brutal, so very important feature. Real time OCR + word for word translation....maybe its not particularly technically interesting on paper, but to watch it on a handheld device in front of your eyes is breathtaking. Do you have a timeline for other languages? (Japanese)

Yeah, no network connection is the killer app here, since you're probably going to need this in another country where you probably don't have network access.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#125

Post by dholowiski »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #112
acangiano wrote: post #2

Whoever created this deserves the boatload of money they are going to make. It has the potential of radically change the experience abroad for people traveling in foreign countries.

If this thing can be made to do Chinese or Japanese... even if it does so haltingly , with mistakes... Raise the price. For the love of god. Raise the price. This is much, much more valuable than five bucks. There have been times in life where I'd gladly have paid a dollar per minute for this. And I'm a cheapskate.

If I was traveling to japan or china, I would gladly pay $50 per language to translate. That's probably too high for an in-app purchase but I think $29 would be a no-brainer for languages that don't use English characters.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#126

Post by dholowiski »

zacharyvoase wrote: post #13

If Smartphone + Wikipedia + Google = Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then this is the Babel fish. And I’m sure that it will also, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, cause more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

All it needs is audio out to a bluetooth headset...

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#127

Post by dholowiski »

ericflo wrote: post #97

I just caught myself thinking: "I hope they got a software patent on this, they deserve it." But I usually hate software patents unequivocally. So, yet again, a real-world use case reminds me that nothing is so black and white.

Yeah if anyone deserves to make buckets of money patenting software it's the developers of this app.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#128

Post by jamiequint »

jonursenbach wrote: post #35

A friend of my girlfriend is part of the team that made this and he gave me a demo of this 5 or 6 months ago and even back then when it was in an early alpha form I was absolutely blown away by this thing. Seeing this thing in action in real life is life changing.

I agree. I saw a demo at Epicenter cafe randomly by this guy about 6 months ago. Its one of the only demos I've ever seen where I felt like 'holy shit I've just seen the future'.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#129

Post by johndeweese »

sliverstorm wrote: post #93

Do you see yourselves extending this to languages based on non-Latin characters? This could be an amazing, amazing tool for Chinese characters- both for foreigners and natives.

absolutely, though some character sets such as chinese are a few orders of magnitude more complex. stretch goal, we're working on it :)

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#130

Post by johndeweese »

johndeweese wrote: post #129
sliverstorm wrote: post #93

Do you see yourselves extending this to languages based on non-Latin characters? This could be an amazing, amazing tool for Chinese characters- both for foreigners and natives.

absolutely, though some character sets such as chinese are a few orders of magnitude more complex. stretch goal, we're working on it :)

it's funny to think about how the advantages of compact encoding influenced the progress of technology. would like to think that we're getting past this by way of Unicode, but this is an analysis problem, so character 'visual encoding' rears its head again.

of course, people are fantastically good at it, if trained in school. looking at /other/ people's scripts though, well, here we are. :)

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