Slashdot Mirror


Microsoft Translator App For Android Can Now Translate Text In a Photo

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has updated its Translator app for Android to add the ability to recognize the text inside a photo. The photo, Microsoft explains, can be something that you have clicked on your phone as well as an image stored on your phone or cloud. "With this new feature in the Translator app for Android, you can translate pictures instantly from your phone, with the translation appearing in an overlay above the existing text. If you see a sign, menu, flyers, etc. you can point your phone's camera at it, and you won't have any confusion about what you're looking at. You can also translate saved images such as pictures from emails, the Internet and social media," the company wrote in a blog post. The new feature supports simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. Additionally, the new update adds 34 languages to the list of available downloaded language packs for use when you're not connected to the Internet.

5 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Um...? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A summary covering this, not mentioning that Google Translate, which comes with Android, has been able to do basically this for a long time? Are we sure this wasn't a paid story?

    1. Re: Um...? by ledow · · Score: 4, Informative

      Not even the entire truth. The Google one will translate text in a moving image or camera feed too. Literally point your phone over a menu and it replaces parts of the image it recognises as text with same-colour translated text in real-time.

  2. Word Lens by iCEBaLM · · Score: 2

    Word Lens already does this, and from the real time video your phones camera picks up.....

    1. Re:Word Lens by MDMurphy · · Score: 3

      Word lens was acquired by Google and incorporated into Google Translate.

      http://questvisual.com/

  3. Poor set of supported languages by short · · Score: 2

    I immediately deleted Microsoft Translate as it knows only several languages. It knows none of the languages I am interested in (incl. my native Czech language). It really cannot compare with Google Translate. I do not understand it much, Microsoft has tons of money to pay more people for writing the vocabularies / whatever.