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Introducing Word Lens

questvisual.com

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Re: Introducing Word Lens

#251

Post by zbailey »

I'm very surprised people have not mentioned this app does not work very well (if at all) when the phone is in any orientation other than straight up and down.

Why is it not possible for the developers to use the orientation sensor/gyroscope to accomodate for this? Many times it's easier to fit a bunch of text on the camera in landscape mode than the alternative. It's also a lot more natural for me to hold my phone in landscape mode when using the camera.

Just my $0.02 and congrats on all the hubbub. Can't wait for more languages :)

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#252

Post by revorad »

staunch wrote: post #41
revorad wrote: post #32

This is one of those times you have to admit it's not ALL about the execution. Good ideas do matter. And they are rare.

And I see the opposite. Anyone could have had this idea, but very few could execute on it. In fact all that will determine whether this is a big success or not is whether the thing really works or not (execution).

A lot of people must have thought of making OCR iPhone apps. But the idea of using OCR to do real-time language translation superposed on the original background image? That's genius. I hadn't thought of it. Did you?

At least in my limited experience, deciding what to work on is really important.

Acknowledging great ideas doesn't take away anything from their superb execution.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#253

Post by Groxx »

Just saw this on the news, actually. Very much sorry, but I didn't catch the channel / show - wasn't close enough to the TV, and it wasn't mine.

Seems like the attention for this has gone way beyond HN. Congratulations!

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#254

Post by jodrellblank »

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.

You should be the only one being surprised. This isn't just a nice app, it's a killer app.

People will buy smartphones/iTouches/tablets for this purpose. Alone.

This is a simple to use, cheap app. on an existing popular platform which makes a significant improvement on a task a lot of people want to do. You're standing there saying "What's all the fuss about Chrome and FireFox? I can browse the internet with IE6 and have done for years!".

This reaction is future shock, this is a surprisingly strong wave in the flow of future technologies and it's shaking people up.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#255

Post by WiseWeasel »

zbailey wrote: post #251

I'm very surprised people have not mentioned this app does not work very well (if at all) when the phone is in any orientation other than straight up and down. Why is it not possible for the developers to use the orientation sensor/gyroscope to accomodate for this? Many times it's easier to fit a bunch of text on the camera in landscape mode than the alternative. It's also a lot more natural for me to hold my phone i…

You can hit the 'lock' button to switch the orientation to landscape.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#256

Post by aperiodic »

masterj wrote: post #160
DanielN wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even an app that converted characters into the most direct meaning could provide insight in a large number of cases into the intended meaning and would be valuable. 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 marke…

The Chinese dictionary app Pleco has an OCR plugin.

Here's a video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#257

Post by yurylifshits »

wallflower wrote: post #248
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…

> Immediately start working on versions for other platforms (Android, Blackberry, Nokia, WinMo) I disagree. I strongly believe this is close to the 1st successful iteration of a killer app for mobile devices (the Babel Fish). One that other platforms might not have for a while. I would be surprised if Apple has not already reached out to invite them to One Infinite Loop to talk about their future plans (not acquisiti…

That's can be the best deal: Apple invests, Word Lens keeps it iPhone only.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#259

Post by solutionyogi »

Groxx wrote: post #253

Just saw this on the news, actually. Very much sorry, but I didn't catch the channel / show - wasn't close enough to the TV, and it wasn't mine. Seems like the attention for this has gone way beyond HN. Congratulations!

I saw it on CNN when I was visiting my dentist.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#260

Post by jodrellblank »

revorad wrote: post #252
staunch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I see the opposite. Anyone could have had this idea, but very few could execute on it. In fact all that will determine whether this is a big success or not is whether the thing really works or not (execution).

A lot of people must have thought of making OCR iPhone apps. But the idea of using OCR to do real-time language translation superposed on the original background image? That's genius. I hadn't thought of it. Did you? At least in my limited experience, deciding what to work on is really important. Acknowledging great ideas doesn't take away anything from their superb execution.

I hadn't thought of it. Did you?

I did: "One that I've mentioned in almost every post here for ages, a service that I can take a photo, it does OCR and feeds the text into Google translate. Bonus points if it does source-language-detection. More bonus points if it is actually usable in a foreign country on real live things like signposts, menus, timetables, advertisements, book covers, leaflets, etc." - me, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569838

Nearly two years ago, travelling in a foreign country with an iPhone, knowing Google Translate existed, knowing OCR existed, and not being able to do anything with that knowledge.

(It's so rare that I hit this kind of advance view on things I'm going to be shamelessly happy about it. NB, I'm not claiming anything here - I couldn't write it and didn't try).

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