Word Lens, an app that translates English text to and from Spanish on the fly, is a reminder of how incredibly powerful apps can be. But how’s it really work? It ain’t perfect, but it’s still pretty damn amazing.
I pointed Word Lens at all the Spanish I could find – the taco truck down the street, a Spanish-language newspaper, some signs on Google Street View and Google images – and I have to say that I was pretty amazed by how well it performed. Sure, sometimes words jump around like shapeshifters on crack, translating and retranslating rapidly as you jiggle the camera. And of course the translations are just done word by word, resulting in broken sentences that rarely have any semblance of correct syntax. But if you come into it with your expectations in check, Word Lens is still a terrific feat in mobile computing, even if its futuristic WOW quotient is, for now, a bit greater than its real world usefulness.
The app, which was released this morning by a company called QuestVisual, was two and half years in the making, according to founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. Good admitted to TechCrunch that the “translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across”, and said that French, Italian and Portuguese were likely candidates for future updates. But even without knowing what updates lie ahead for Word Lens, it’s already an undeniably exciting taste of the future, one of the rare apps that transforms our smartphones into something entirely new. [
jack
Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 4:44 PMIsn’t this similar to goggles?
As a matter of fact, I worked on a very similar app as part of my graduation project.
matt
Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 4:49 PMheh, cool, I called this when giz first started banging on about ‘augmented reality’ apps that were just stupid ads.
still, it being in the works for 2.5 years shows quite a bit of foresight. (were there even iPhones then?)
took it a bit further than I would have too, by actually trying to emulate the font, colour and style of the text!
THIS is an augmented reality app!
Chris J
Saturday, December 18, 2010 at 10:51 PMI’m confused – so how is this significantly better than Google Goggles?
Jon
Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 1:35 PMThe app itself is free, but only includes a ‘demo’ functionality of reversing words.
Each additional language costs (for me) AUD$6.00. A price tag of $6 per language isn’t bad, but I think I’ll wait until I have plane tickets purchased before I go installing any Word Lens languages.
Sam Timmins
Sunday, December 19, 2010 at 7:18 PMSandra Bullock loves Anus?
This app might need work.
(Or Sandra’s hobbies are kinky!)
kakyoin
Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:15 AMwhy is so many compare this app to Goggles?
you guys never used Goggles before? from what i read in the article, this app translates Spanish in real time (kind of)
where as Googles needs to take a picture for the context and do the translation
so its “similar” but alot different