151–160 of 298 posts
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.
Wow. I downloaded the app, bought the Spanish -> English pack, and tried it with some simple phrases in a big TextEdit window on my monitor. It flickered a bit, but I expected that from a monitor. It got them right. Big deal, common phrases are easy -- I could just buy a phrasebook. Then I tried a random phrase from the Spanish version of "Dive into Python": Una función, como cualquier otra cosa en Python, es un obje…
I live in Montreal and you are right that you would need to understand some French but only to read signalization, some store names and public advertisement. Signalization of course is important if you are driving but an app like this won't help you (you are holding the wheel I hope). Besides that, almost any store or institution has bilingual staff (and when they don't most French speakers will understand basic Engl…
Wow. Just Wow. I had to put the App to test. Printed some simple English words and tried it out. Original paper: http://imgur.com/EYsko What the App shows in REALTIME: http://imgur.com/FhaSW Comparison with Google Translate: http://imgur.com/GOd94.jpg [EDIT: Note, Translating Muerto Fin to English in Google Translate, does result in 'Dead End'. Can any Spanish reader clarify why the original Google Translate chose to…
I like how "Make right turn" becomes "Make correct turn".
The product is so cool and it seems to work so well, I have to admid that I am a bit jealous. I would have been proud to be able to say "I did is".
To the executing team responsible of the application: be proud what you did. Great work.
I am so happy for these guys. You believed it's doable and you did it. Congratulations once again.
I would love to read the "project diary". How long did it take to, what were the unexpected problems, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you guy's explored at all how difficult mandarin translations will be? If it is possible this would be a huge market for you.
Depending on how their OCR works, Mandarin/Japanese->English(/spanish/&c) could be a _lot_ more difficult (thousands of characters to distinguish) and in the case of Japanese the translation a lot trickier (completely different grammar, Mandarin's not so bad though). This could just be a case of needing to optimize and train their recognizer to deal with a much larger set of possible characters, or it could require i…
Of course, guessing the correct word when performing word-for-word translation of hanzi is almost impossible, so even the extremely primitive product I'm thinking of is very difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on how their OCR works, Mandarin/Japanese->English(/spanish/&c) could be a _lot_ more difficult (thousands of characters to distinguish) and in the case of Japanese the translation a lot trickier (completely different grammar, Mandarin's not so bad though). This could just be a case of needing to optimize and train their recognizer to deal with a much larger set of possible characters, or it could require i…
This is what I was thinking. I don't know about Japanese, but sentence structure in mandarin is pretty much reversed from what it is in romance languages. And so much of character meaning is based on context that outside of common phrases it might be nearly impossible. On the other hand, an English to Chinese translator might be more doable, and might also be more commercially profitable.
An app that converted from characters to pinyin (a much easier problem) would be gold to someone trying to learn mandarin. I'd easily pay $50 for something with that functionality without it even making an attempt at the english. It's a much smaller market than those trying to understand chinese signs on a vacation, but it's one with a much larger stake and interest in the result.