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Word Lens — Augmented Reality Translation
Barence writes "PC Pro has a review of a new augmented reality iPhone app that translates from Spanish to English on the fly. 'Point the camera at a decent-sized chunk of Spanish text and within a couple of seconds you'll get a rough and ready translation,' said the reviewer. 'And most magnificently of all, the translation is overlaid, at the correct size, on the original object.' The team behind the project has produced a video of Word Lens in action."
This is pretty damn cool. But no android app. No news if they plan on releasing one. In fact, their site is pretty void of any information at all. I would buy this just to play with it, but I'll never be an iphone guy.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
I expect mistakes of Newton hand writing recognition like proportions. Let the laughs begin.
Okay let's see, we combine the terror of OCR with mangled language translation and the pit fall of cropped or intersecting text patches and variable fonts and multiple contexts? My hovercraft is indeed full of eels.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
We *really* need some practical computer goggles/glasses already. Think about how much more badass this would be if you didn't even have to hold a phone in front of your face.
I think I could life with low framerate in the real world if it got me stuff like this.
Someone was showing this off at TechShop last evening. Very nice.
i remember the days when all the new cool tech was only seen in the government and large corporations first and then trickled down to us peons. these days with our rampant consumerism it's the opposite. we see cool stuff like this first and it's cheap and the big boys are now playing catch up because things move so fast
if it wasn't for our vane consumerism this would be a government project costing tens of millions of $$$ in R&D and the devices would be single use devices that also cost some ridiculous amount of money
Too bad that this system only works with limited amount of texts. I installed this app on my iPod Touch and tried the default text reversing filter. If I used a Serif font, this could not read the words realiably. Fonts needed to be Sans Serif. Also this uses some dictionaries so if the word is not in dictionary (eg. deemed offensive) or some random gibberish, this could not recognize it. And all this I did with large black text on white background so viewing conditions are definitely not the issue.
It also goes in the other direction so they can understand English as well. I don't see what the problem is with having a device that is useful to damn near everyone.
Now they just need to do the same for economically relevant languages. The top developing countries currently are Brazil, India, and China (in no particular order) and none of them speak Spanish as a primary language.
Of course, I tried to use a similar argument decades ago in school when everyone told me I needed to learn Spanish (while living in a state that was dramatically closer to French Canada than to Mexico, but oh well), and I still ended up taking three years of a language that I almost never encounter in my regular existence.
Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, I hear every day at work. In my work Espanol is marginally more valuable than Esperanto. But what do I know, really...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Actually, I could use something like that... I live in the Sunset Park neighborhood in Brooklyn and for a few blocks in every direction nearly everything is in Spanish. Most of the shops have names in Spanish, packages inside are often Spanish... And I don't read Spanish...
I remember back in the early 90s when a guy showed me an 8Gb backup tape he had in his shirt pocket and I thought, Holy Crap, 8 GIGA-bytes fits in your pocket now? That's Awesome! And now, years later, you can carry many times that much data on a keychain. Equally Awesome. And this, this translator thing... totally and completely Awesome and Amazing. If you picture yourself as someone from say 100 years ago looking at today's world, some things we take for granted are pretty much like magic.
These guys just opened a gold mine.
I'm sure there will be a ton of cynical and jaded comments here, but this is a working prototype of augmented reality that is actually immediately and unquestionably useful, even in its infant state. Even non-technical people can see the promise of this, and graspable promise equals investment.
Bravo, and congratulations to the developers!
Are you just trolling or are you REALLY this stupid? You really can't imagine a time when an English-speaking person is in a foreign country where all the signs are printed in Spanish and you can't imagine a time when a Spanish-speaking person is visiting a country where the signs are printed in English?
Just read this on MSNBC. The author shows what happens when trying it on basic Spanish.
Overall, not worth the money until it gets heavily reworked.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
... when he says that one of the reasons the iPhone won't run Flash is because it doesn't have the processing power.
You're telling me it can have the power needed to do something like this - analyze an image for text, decode it, put sentences together, translate, match the most appropriate font and colours, scrub the original text, render the new text at the appropriate angle and position - but not to play Flash movies. I call bullshit.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
You mean Chinglish? It depends on the source of translation.
Life is not for the lazy.
to wait for the bugs to be worked out over a few releases. It's cool and awesome, but I don't know how useful it'd be in its present state of word-only translation.
"LO TRADUCE EL TEXTO" is not a Spanish phrase, unless you want to say "Text translates it". The Spanish phrase would have been "TRADUCE TEXTO" but I think the result with that tool was so bad they changed the Spanish text until the bad translation rendered a good English phrase.
The same happens with other examples from that video such as "ROPAS OPCIONAL EN ESTA PLAYA". The only way you are going to read that sign is if you ask an English speaker to write it.
What they did was write the English phrases, translate them to Spanish and then translate them back for the video.
reminds me of a friend of mine who's hospital forced him to replace the typists that transcribed dictations with dragon speak software. They quickly discovered that it was pretty accurate except for small words like "not", as in "the tumor does (not) appear to be malignant"
translate geek-to-English? THAT would be magical!
$5 and it's not good enough!?!
On the other hand. On iTunes there's one review complaining that it should be free and ad supported. Sigh
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
No, you need a small fish for that.
La traduction de anglais à espagnol est belle merdique.
The app is free but the Spanish-to-English functionality costs $5.
It is totally helpless vs. handwriting.
When viewing nice clean computer text on my screen, and when the phone is held very still, it produces the usual clunky translation.
It would be very much better than nothing when attempting rapid translations in a foreign culture.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
Interesting. How do you say "Whoosh" in Spanish, by the way?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Where are all the people who feel it's not really necessary apply correct spelling ?
What a depressingly stupid machine.
El-Whoooosho
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
You can say El Woosh, but that's just one of their wrestlers.
No, this demonstrates what can be done when people write code using libraries that are compiled for a very specific hardware spec. Whereas Flash performs in a very un-optimized hardware-abstracted manner, it requires a lot of extra CPU to perform even the most rudimentary tasks.
You get back to me when this is implemented via Flash on Android and let's just see how long the battery lasts on your phone.
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Thank you. I too am shocked at how many people would take that at face value.
I've been insisting to my wife for some time now that the way to translate anything from English to Spanish is just to add "el-" at the beginning at "-o" at the end. El-translateo! Or at least they'll get the gist of it, especially if you say it loudly enough.
It would probably be easier for you to get a sense of humor than for me to try and explain it to you.
I write comedy -- and get paid for it -- so there's a very good chance I understand it better than you do. If your post was an example of you attempting humor, it's clear that you're not very good at it.
The app does two things out of the gate that show it works - it has a mode that reverses words randomly, and another mode that erases random words. Both are damn impressive and show it can do what it says - so I went ahead and bought the spanish->English pack knowing I might have need of it in the future when travelling.
If you follow app sales closely (and being an iPhone developer, I take every chance I get to review trends) by far the way to make money in an app is with a free version that has in-app purchase. You have to change .99 (the minimum) and you literally get millions more people trying an application that is free than you do with an app that costs any amount of money. So I think they took the approach that will yield them far more money in the end, and also lets users have the language packs that are most useful to them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually, Lo traduce el texto, meaning "it translates the text," is actually grammatical in Spanish; but only works in certain conversational contexts, and definitely not in one like that. It'd have to be something like this:
Despues que uno entra el texto, qué hace la aplicación? ("After you enter the text, what does the application do?")
Lo traduce el texto. ("It translates the text.")
This is of course of no credit to the writers of this "translation" app. It seems to be looping over the words, looking them up in the dictionary and spitting out the top translation it gets for them, with no attempt to actually take care of word order or to use the context in which a word appears to choose the best translation.
Are you adequate?
...not as nice as a globally decided and universally taught world auxiliary language would be (whether it might be English or whatever gained agreement). Would be much cooler not needing to use translation tools by actually having a shared language taught everywhere.
You've already taken a severe karma hit from your original post (which, by the way, was an excellent example of sarcasm and I applaud you for it). Do you really want to go for two?
Sorry, "dos"?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Pleco Software ( http://www.pleco.com/ ) has a version of this for their excellent Chinese dictionary software. There's a video of the prototype at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7VTo0656Rc
I'm not sure if the above works on the latest (4th-gen) iPod Touch with camera, or only iPhone.
I'm not affiliated with Pleco, other than as a very happy customer of theirs for about 8 years. I first got their electronic Chinese dictionary software for a Palm Pilot back then, and then more recently migrated (for free) to their iOS version for my iPod Touch. The dictionaries they license aren't cheap, but they're very good, and their software and support is great; I highly recommend them.
Most of the signs supposedly in Spanish make no sense and seem to be Google old automatic translations. Quite disappointing.
Of course you do.
"Lo traduce el texto" is definitely not grammatical in standard Spanish, because it has two direct objects: "lo" and "el texto". It might be acceptable in some dialect I haven't come across.
Oh boy. This was one of the things I studied in my first year of grad school in Linguistics, so it was a long time ago. This is called "clitic doubling." I remember things being as follows:
Direct object clitic doubling in most Spanish dialects is permissible only in some conversational contexts, and IIRC depends on things like topic/focus structure of the dialogue, and parallel structure of coordinate clauses. The best examples I concocted in my research went something like this: A Pedro le mataron al hermano, a María le mataron a su madre, pero a Juan lo mataron a él. ("Peter, they killed his brother, Mary, they killed her mother, but John, they killed him"). In the final clause of that sentence, the direct object clitic doubling is in fact obligatory.
Are you adequate?
No, el texto is certainly the direct object. For example, the verb doesn't agree with it: La máquina traduce el texto. La máquina traduce los textos. Las máquinas traducen el texto.
Are you adequate?
Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5Vb9SLkq5k from http://videosift.com/video/The-Manslator :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
You expected an actual sense of humor here? People only laugh at jokes they've seen a million times before. Try making fun of Microsoft or quoting Monty Python. That's pretty much all that gets through to these people.
I've been researching this area for my masters. Just getting the basic text localisation (i.e. recognising an area as containing text) working reliably is very difficult - there are some good algorithms out there but in the real world, with 1000s of fonts, font sizes, angles, lighting conditions etc, I've yet to see a 1 size fits all approach. And even if you do find an area of text, throwing that into an OCR engine is going to produce garbage for the most part. In short, its quite easy to show something off in controlled conditions but I wouldn't expect anything like the performance seen in the video in the real world.
The above said, very impressed to see that on an iphone and for it to be so responsive; these things can only get better and once some form of viable HMD makes it onto the scene these types of application are going to be massive.
If somebody with a size challenged funny bone can make money writing comedy, then you should make a killing.
Mark Twain received many death threats, probably at couple of those from professional comedy writers.
damaged by dogma
A subtle joke. :D
Man, I wish I could mod you up!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Some spanish boards were plagued with grammatical errors in order for the translation to work.
Examples:
"Lo traduce el texto" is wrong. It should be "Traduce el texto"
Reversal:
"Y lo va el otro direccion" is horrid. Should be "y va en la otra dirección" Although this is hard to translate without context.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
A risqué statement is only considered a joke when one can be certain the person is y'know actually joking. It's far too easy to assume the random poster is some racist who hates the growing Spanish speaking population in the U.S, and wants to bitch about any tech geared towards bridging the language gap.