221–230 of 298 posts
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.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/24/pleco-chinese-dictionary-...
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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.
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(Native Spanish speaker here.) First: This app is amazing! But I think that this app is doing almost a word by word translations, without a list of usual expressions or grammatical analysis. For example, the correct translation of 'Dead End' is 'callejón sin salida' , that means literally something like 'street without exit' . Translating word by word 'Dead End' you obtain 'Muerto Fin' that is unintelligible. Another…
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.
Are you hiring? ;) I am a native Spanish speaker btw.
yeah doing it so fast on a mobile device is impressive, but am I alone in thinking this isn't going to change the world?
In a heartbeat.
for the sake of being contrarian, why all the freaking out? it's cool and all, but it's OCR + translation, two things computers are already pretty good at (not to mention word lens seems to be doing word-for-word translation, not context-sensitive). yeah doing it so fast on a mobile device is impressive, but am I alone in thinking this isn't going to change the world?
You are looking at a product from it's technical merits only.
From a product perspective, I can travel to any country in the world and read the signs on the shop, read menus, or even learn the language since I have an always available translator to help.
It makes the world smaller and more accessible. Those things always change the world
These guys are going to have some hard decisions to make in the next few months. This has such incredible potential I'd be really sad to see it get bought and languish as a side-feature at Google. Run as a business, rather than a free technology project liable to be side-lined on whatever whim, and really developed for the next 5 years, think about what it could be! I mean, just look at what it is today on day one! T…
I doubt they will be bought by Google, Apple is probably already writing cheques. Apple has been getting the pants beat off them by Google in mobile translation for awhile now. If there is a patent behind this then Apple will grab this for their stable just to keep it off the Android platform. It would be a huge 'one-up' for them. (which makes me sad as I strongly prefer Android devices) In time you'll see it license…
While I agree this is a killer app for the iOS platform, it doesn't yet have the polish that Jobs would demand for a live demo. A good deal of that is the hardware contraints of the system.
I think if you had invented a dedicated device that did nothing but this app it would sell like hotcakes, and we've heard in this forum that people are considering buying iPod touches just to give them out this app to family.
Thus if you wanted to move the needle from 'wow' to 'insanely great' it would take hardware level engineering to optimize the device, which I don't think it outside the realm of possibility.
Remember it was killer apps like quake, unreal, and crisis that moved the graphics card industry for years. This app has the potential for even broader appeal, and its successors will require even more horsepower.
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…
Because "dead end" means "callejon sin salida". That's the correct translation (callejon = road, sin salida = w/out exit). On the other hand, "muerto fin" has NO meaning in spanish, (and that's what you get when you translate word for word without context).
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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.
I think that most of the time a word-for-word translation is enough. I use Google translator a lot, and most of the time the translation is not perfect but it is good enough. So I think that is app is very useful. But I think that the real problem are the idioms and phrases, like "dead end", that have a completely different translation. On the other hand, I think that you have more processing time that 1/10 sec. Most…
Still, amazing technology, specially since it's all client-side. Hopefully they'll have some contextual analysis in the future or enable Google Translation API use.
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.
* OCR, to identify the text * Removing the background of the text, filling it with surrounding colors * Translating words * Placing new words on the same area, using the same rectangle
It's very, very clever, but it's not something that should be controlled by one person or company. Should any combination of existing techniques will also be patentable? Where do we draw the line?
They were the first and they'll have a head start and make a lot of money. Now, be exclusive? I don't think so.