191–200 of 298 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you plan on creating an Android version anytime soon?
For the love of FSM, do it! I speak for a vast majority of Android users here on HN when I say I'd buy this even if it cost five times what it does now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you plan on creating an Android version anytime soon?
For the love of FSM, do it! I speak for a vast majority of Android users here on HN when I say I'd buy this even if it cost five times what it does now.
Looks extraordinary by the HN comments; unfortunately the site is down right now... ;-( La rançon du succès, I guess.
A minor thing about the webpage: If I want to share it on facebook (and I do!), it does not come up with any sort of summary or images, like it normally does for links. Now, I don't know exactly how it gets this information, but I would definitely find out if I were you.
I downloaded it immediately. Making it free to try and selling the dictionaries is a great sales model. The demo mode does a mirror-image reversal of the word to show you that it can detect words. I was using a 4th gen iPod Touch, so lower-res camera and no flash. Unfortunately, I was not able to get it to work as well as I'd hoped. I tested physical copies of a few things: 1. Mac OS X Snow Leopard cd case. Black san…
The lessons I learned today from Word Lens
Assembly innovation is really cool. Every piece of Word Lens was here, but nobody made a perfect combination before today. Academic researchers will never do another Word Lens, as they are overfocused on novelty and hate just-assemble-the-pieces work.
Clever freemium business model. Word Lens is free, but you have to buy language packs. "erase words" and "reverse words" are free demo modes to prove that the app really works. Note, that you can even turn it into subscription model with dictionary updates.
BlendBack is the heart of this invention. Word Lens goes like this: (1) detect and recognize characters, (2) translate, (3) produce text in similar colors and shape and blend it back to the picture. The last step is the most innovative and can be used beyond Word Lens. E.g. one can do "Bar Code replacer". Turn your phone on any barcode and see some picture there. Can be used as a cheap replacement for road signs and ads.
No connection required. This is extremely important. 3G is unstable. WiFi is not everywhere. 4G has not really arrived yet. When you travel, your carrier can not cover you perfectly. I can see more and more essential apps that will not require connection. "Yelp in a box" anyone?
Global appeal. This is not another geek's app. It is mom and pop's app. It is an app for every country and and every village. We need to spend more time outside Silicon Valley to find needs like this one.
Science fiction inspiration. Part of the reason for press craziness is that Word Lens matched the science fiction story (Babel fish from "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"). We love seeing SF concepts turning into reality. Let's reread old classic and implement all other concepts from there :)
What I would do next
Brainstorm pricing. A lot of options are available: different price for the first month, bundle prices for several languages, one-time price discount (a la 23andme), subscription model, enterprise package.
Put on hold all talks to investors and potential acquirers.
Immediately start working on versions for other platforms (Android, Blackberry, Nokia, WinMo). Hire another person to do just that.
Run a contest: iPhone for the best "Word Lens in the wild" video.
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.
The dictionary is free and the OCR is available as an in app purchase for $15.
I'm just saying this because it is not trivial to adapt an OCR engine to non-latin scripts, because the image analysis techniques are rather different.
I agree that it's impressive, but the flash video felt like cheating. For instance, no spanish speaker would EVER say "LO TRADUCE EL TEXTO" (@ 0:20), or "ROPAS OPCIONAL" (@ 0:50). They just picked some words in spanish that made sense when translated, but my guess is that average translation would be much more awful
Unless it translates `apple` as `chair` - I'll understand what the meaning is.
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.
There already exists an impressive Chinese real-time OCR dictionary for the iPhone called Pleco: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc The dictionary is free and the OCR is available as an in app purchase for $15. I'm just saying this because it is not trivial to adapt an OCR engine to non-latin scripts, because the image analysis techniques are rather different.
I understand that Chinese is harder, for many reasons. It is also much harder for humans. But that is why I'd happily pay, say, $10 per day of my trip for an engine that gives reasonable hints. Maybe more. Try me and see.
Of course, once this technology is ubiquitous and the price of such a thing has fallen to nigh-zero it is going to change the world. But we have to walk before we run, and you'll need the money for R&D and legal costs.