If you developed EnglishArabic/Dari/Pashto, you could probably make a few million sales to the U.S. government.
Introducing Word Lens
261–270 of 298 posts
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#262Cute undocumented (that i could find) Easter egg on the Reverse Words feature - It also 'corrects' the spelling. heh. (Discovered when it insisted the reverse of "Shephard" was drehpehS)
I guess that's an accidental part of word based OCR rather than a deliberate spellcheck, I noticed it correct the name "Keysource" to "ecruosyeR"
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Vietnamese would be easier to recognize/do a translation pack for too, now you mention it - basically the Latin alphabet with extra marks to make 30 letters. Apparently there are more north Vietnamese around here and Oakland, more South Vietnamese in SJ and down south, maybe 450k in all of CA. Chinese-American maybe 5-600k? More than 150k in SF.
Incidentally, there's other and easier untapped startup opportunities for the Asian language demographic, if anyone wants to send me a note via gmail
My in-laws are a mix so either language is good, both is better. I can promise 3 Android and 1 iPhone sale just in my home :)
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#264This is going to do to traveling what the iPhone did to smartphones.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#265One day tourists are going to buy "holiday glasses". They'll walk around Paris, stop at a nice restaurant, put on their glasses, and read the whole menu in English. Then they'll order by pointing. Hell, they can do this with their phone right now, the glasses just make it easier.
Head-mounted displays have been around for so long in a crappy form. I can't wait until Oakley or Apple finally catch the HMD bug and make something nice. Maybe this kind of app will be the push.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the translation is the amazing part – as one of the creators said here, at the moment it mostly does word-for-word translation. Google’s statistical machine translation is mightily impressive technology, I’m not sure whether you could even theoretically put it on a phone at the moment. You would ideally want the OCR and text replacement together with Google’s translation algorithms, which, besides requi…
Requiring a network connection would also make it useless while travelling abroad, which would probably make up about 90% of the times when you'd actually need this app. Not using a network connection is vital for this app to be of any real use.
So do both. You're on the net, you get better results. You're not on the net, you can still get by.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#267I 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.
I hope they got a software patent if only to help protect themselves against trolls who are filing patents for this right now.
The problem with this reasoning is obvious: given that "idea patents" are now commonly awarded, these guys are much more likely to be sued by a troll who has already acquired a patent on the idea, than they are to be able to defend their IP by threatening a patent suit against someone else. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
Patents are no defense against patent trolls, because (by definition) the patent trolls don't actually produce anything. There is no defense against patent trolls, except lobbying to narrow the scope and duration of technology patents.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#268I'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.
On an iPad, but not on an iPhone.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#269Am 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.
Gestalt is everything.
Re: Introducing Word Lens
#270The product seems amazing, but they are somehow cheating in the video. The signs (in Spanish) have grammar mistakes, but they are automatically translated to correct English sentences. I have a few examples: - The third sign says "Lo traduce el texto", but that sentence doesn't make sense. It should be "Traduce el texto" or even "Se traduce el texto". - 'Ropas opcional' sounds strange to me, although it may be accept…
It's called marketing and frankly I don't think it takes anything away from the app.
Sure it does. I'd be impressed with this app doing word-for-word translation if that's what I expected. If On the other hand, if the examples uses grammatically incorrect source material to give the impression that it can do more than it can, I feel irritated at being misled, and I'm much less likely to support the product.