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Introducing Word Lens

questvisual.com

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Re: Introducing Word Lens

#291

Post by mitjak »

otaviogood wrote: post #117
michaelhoney wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John, outstanding work. Word-for-word is IMO more interesting too, because you understand enough to get the point across - but you still get the flavour of the language and enjoy the idioms. Huge, huge potential. You win the Internet today.

Thanks for the positive feedback (I'm one of the developers). We never imagined we'd win the internets!!! :P About the word for word thing, that is mostly correct to say it's word-for-word. We have just a few short phrases in there, like "por favor". If that didn't translate correctly, it would have been teh lame.

>We never imagined we'd win the internets!!!

Oh please, I mean, it's only one of a kind app that millions could make use of :)

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#293

Post by wtallis »

ams6110 wrote: post #106
d2viant wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US military could outbid both of them.

The military has no interest in owning a software company.

The military doesn't have to make a bid to buy them. All they have to do is throw down a billion dollar contract for prototyping an arabic version and Quest Visual will have no reason to sell.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#294

Post by catch23 »

whatever_dude wrote: post #230
ericflo wrote: post #97

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.

The problem is that it is a clever combination of techniques that already exist. * 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…

As a friend who knows octavio, they've tried various "OCR" techniques from typical journal papers and in general those types of algorithms were mostly for static images. They struggled for 2 years to find the best techniques and I think they final product is great.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#295

Post by catch23 »

mattdeboard wrote: post #215
dannyr wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two guys: John and Otavio.

My. God.

Well Octavio did work a full year on it before finding John, and still took another year of hard work before they were able to release a quality product.

Hopefully this app is a home run for them!

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#296

Post by otaviogood »

nathanlrivera wrote: post #180
johndeweese wrote: post #14

(hola, i'm john deweese, one of the creators) good to hear the early positive response, and we look forward to your insightful feedback (support@questvisual.com) -- mention this site so we pay some extra attention. i hope this app will be nice and disruptive, and we'll be looking carefully at what people expect and how they actually use it. it's a platform, and we're really excited about the directions it opens up. t…

1. The logo seems similar to the United Nations logo. What was your inspiration for the logo? 2. In the video, who is holding the camera? And who is holding the signs? 3. Did you use an ad agency to make the video, or did you put it together yourselves? The first card says "welcome to the future" which I thought was perfect :)

The designer who made the logo said he was going for a passport look. My brother made the video. He also did the music in the video. He's pretty good with that stuff.

Re: Introducing Word Lens

#297

Post by omaranto »

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…

I just read a bunch of reviews in the app store and there are plenty one star reviews that say something like "what a rip off! This isn't free at all! You need to buy the language packs to do anything", a lot of those reviews even add that if it just cost $10 instead of falsely claiming to be free it would sell like crazy. So maybe the freemium model is a little too clever.
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