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Introducing Word Lens

questvisual.com

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Re: Introducing Word Lens

#201

Post by younata »

anigbrowl wrote: post #120
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.

Yes. No Android yet but this seems worth $10 to me. I'd do Chinese first. There's a big market for that in California; many Asian families have a language gap between grandparents or parents born abroad and a younger generation born here. Basic communication is easy but things slow down fast if conversation turns to anything complex. Being able to print some words neatly by hand in English and instantly get Cantonese…

Actually, Vietnamese would work better.

We have a lot more Vietnam refugees here than we do Chinese folks. If you'll notice, the three main languages you can get government papers in (at least over in San Jose, no experience elsewhere) is English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#202

Post by SimonPStevens »

aresant wrote: post #139

The walls are coming down so fast it's making my head spin - job well done! I immediately sent the link to a dozen people, about half wrote back "How much is it?" and "How do I download it?" Since QuestVisual.com is clearly going to sweep the entirety of the internets by this time next week a few friendly conversion suggestions: a) Change your button to "Try Word Lens FREE - Click Here" b) The logo under your button…

Totally agree. If you want people to follow that link you need a much much stronger call to action.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#204

Post by johnyzee »

stevelosh wrote: post #57

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…

Combine the technology with something like http://www.gizmag.com/vuzix-wrap-920ar-augmented-reality-gla... and you could walk down the street and read everything in your own language.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#205

Post by toumhi »

Am I the only one to be surprised by the overwhelming reaction of the HN crowd? Doing word by word translation is not so exciting from a technology point of view, is it because all the other apps doing translation on a phone are crap? I believe there are libraries that already store language translations, right? Seriously wondering why everybody is jumping and shouting how great and disruptive this is.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#206

Post by tomjen3 »

dholowiski wrote: post #145

I showed this app to my 60 year old semi-technophobic parents and they immediately understood it. They are ready to buy an iPod touch to use with this app for their next cruise. My mom guessed the cost of a language at $50 and was shocked to hear the actual price. Screw zuckerberg, The developers of this app should be on the cover of time magazine.

And that is what you call a killer app.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#207

Post by kelnos »

toumhi wrote: post #205

Am I the only one to be surprised by the overwhelming reaction of the HN crowd? Doing word by word translation is not so exciting from a technology point of view, is it because all the other apps doing translation on a phone are crap? I believe there are libraries that already store language translations, right? Seriously wondering why everybody is jumping and shouting how great and disruptive this is.

I think it's more the speed, and the fact that it's not just doing the word-by-word translation, but it's doing OCR first, and, as a nice touch, it at least makes a vague effort to visually look similar to the original text (well, color at least)... and it does all this without using a network connection at all.

The 'traditional' method of firing up something like the Google Translate app, manually (and potentially painfully, if it's a language that uses symbols you aren't used to typing in on a regular basis) typing in the text, and maybe waiting for a server in the cloud to spit back response... is just crap compared to something like this. Even if Word Lens doesn't do proper grammatical and idiomatic translation (yet?), it still seems like it'd be super useful.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#209

Post by ndunn2 »

yurylifshits wrote: post #196

Re-posting here from my blog http://yurylifshits.com/lessons-learned-from-the-launch-of-w... The lessons I learned today from Word Lens Everything is secondary to compelling usecase. Word Lens has strange company name (QuestVisual), no logo, crappy landing page, and no PR preparation. But its darn cool! And that's what matters. Assembly innovation is really cool. Every piece of Word Lens was here, but nobody made a p…

You didn't learn any lessons about.. how well it works? I had very poor success in my apartment, but I'd like to try it outside.
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