Monday, April 24, 2017

Word Translator


Word Lens Translator
This is an app that is still in development. Below is the description for the Android app.

(which is no longer available). However, this app is being developed for the Hololens. We will have to keep our eyes on it.

Word Lens Translator is an application that provides real time translations on your Android device by using its camera.
Lost in translation?

Traveling to another country without speaking the language is nerve wracking. While Word Lens won't teach you to speak a new language, it will enable you to read it at the very least. Word Lens uses your Android device's camera to detect text and automatically translate words and sentences on the fly.
A window onto a new language

Word Lens is very simple to use. You just hold your phone or tablet up to a sign or a piece of text in another language and watch the screen as the text changes to your language before your very eyes. It doesn't work flawlessly, but the overall effect is very impressive, and dare I say it, futuristic.

Unlike the iOS version, the language packs in Word Lens for Android are all free. As of this review, the languages available are Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, and Portuguese. There's also a demo of the technology that shows you it works by reversing words and erasing words.

There is a dictionary within the application to look up words that the app fails to translate properly or if you just want to find a word's definition quickly, without using the camera. This is great feature but the definitions that it provided were a hit or miss.