Introducing Word Lens, for Android

http://blog.questvisual.com/post/26612327582/quest-visual-is-pleased-to-make-several

by jf • 14 years ago

76 61 14 years ago

blog.questvisual.com

mondras• 14 years ago

nice!

I think there's definitely a gap in the market for something a bit simpler: there have been a good number of times when I've been stumped by a word or two in a sentence (in Polish) written on something in the street, and have resorted to taking a cameraphone photo and translating later when at home.

Sadly, as I'd love to have a play, the app store says that it's incompatible with my cheapo ZTE blade.

bullfroge• 14 years ago

It isn't compatible with my Droid X either, which surprised me. Play doesn't tell me why, which is inconvenient.

mattbot5000• 14 years ago

Really? It's compatible with my Droid X.

jeztek8• 14 years ago

We haven't blacklisted the Droid X. Can you let us know what kind of problems you're seeing?

mtgx2• 14 years ago

I'm not surprised. It has a very slow processor, and for this kind of processing you need a lot of power. In fact, I think the (original?) developer of Word Lens said he first made it in Assembly to make it fast enough even for an iPhone 4.

Plus, your phone is also on the ARMv6 architecture, and for the kind of optimization they need to do, they didn't want to bother with that older architecture.

For the record right now I have a phone with a similar processor as well, but planning on switching to a Nexus this fall.

jeztek8• 14 years ago

Yep, that's correct, critical sections of the pipeline are coded in assembly. Also, Word Lens only works with Android devices that have NEON support.

baconner• 14 years ago

Not compatible with the n1 either which is pretty rare. I wonder why...

jeztek8• 14 years ago

We ran into performance issues on the N1 that made for a very poor experience. In testing, the N1 oddly worked fine when we replaced the stock firmware with Cyanogen. That would have really confused users though so we had to blacklist the N1.

wesus• 14 years ago

sweet!

jack-r-abbit6• 14 years ago

WHOA! How freakin' cool would this be on Google Glasses when traveling abroad! Everywhere you look... the text is just translated for you.

inkaudio2• 14 years ago

I conveyed this to the developers[1] a few months ago, this would be a great acquisition for the Google Glass project.

[1]https://twitter.com/inkaudio/status/195677653049683969

s_henry_paulson2• 14 years ago

An acquisition would only make sense if they had relevant patents to purchase, which they do not.

glhaynes2• 14 years ago

If it can do that, it will be pretty easy to make it appear to "take the clothes off" people. (Note, I'm very much not saying this should be done, just that it will be done.) They say that to calm your nerves when public speaking, you should visualize your audience in their underwear. Will be psychologically interesting, at least, to see how that works out for the first Glasses-wearing presenter to try it. Strange world we live in.

dnlhoust• 14 years ago

I'm failing to see how you've made that jump? How does recognizing words, translating them and displaying the result compare to mapping a naked body from only uncovered skin? at best, you could get the correct skin tone on a model.

aclimatt• 14 years ago

Indeed, and it already seemed like this was definitely on their to-do list from the Glass keynote. I don't know how you could build a product like Glass and /not/ do that (other than it perhaps being an extremely difficult problem ;P).

More than that, microphone + reasonable speech recognition = everybody you talk to is instantly subtitled. Also an extremely difficult problem, but one I'll bet will be commonplace in 15 years.

jack-r-abbit6• 14 years ago

Mind blown! Having everyone subtitled would be way cool for traveling abroad. But even more so for the hearing impaired.

tomjen32• 14 years ago

I take it that you are not familiar with the way the German language order words?

Because there is no way you could accurately subtitle German in English, other than knowing what he is going to say before he say it.

FelixP• 14 years ago

This is incredible. We're living in the future!

s_henry_paulson2• 14 years ago

As someone who travels a lot, I've been hoping to get more out of this app, but it's been almost 2 years now, and I can only choose Spanish or French. (according to this page Italian is also available, but I don't have that option on my phone yet)

Since they're only translating each individual word (and not phrases or sentences), I wonder why it takes them so long to put out new languages.

jeztek8• 14 years ago

Hi s_henry_paulson, check the app store for an update, we released 1.2 last night, which should include Italian.

We've been short-staffed until very recently, stay tuned for more languages!

J3L2404• 14 years ago

Two years is an awful long time to go from iOS to Android.

veemjeem• 14 years ago

Not a long time when you consider how long it took them to write their first release.

cpeterso• 14 years ago

How long did the initial iOS release take?

bdcravens• 14 years ago

Why did it take so long? Small team, SDK limitations, funding? I can't imagine that porting an Obj-C code base to Java would take as long as it did. (Doesn't matter how long original code base took; that was development, whereas porting code is more "manufacturing") Not trolling, just curious.

newhouseb• 14 years ago

I'm sure what took so long is a combination of a) ridiculously poor/inconsistent camera API's b) less than satisfactory SIMD support. When I ported some camera stuff from IOS to Android it took me 3X as long due to the need to work around bugs in the SDK. I'm sure they had to do all sorts of nasty things with the JNI to get it performant as well, and I'm not even sure the JNI supports things like the C++ STL yet.

jbellis• 14 years ago

Hasn't google goggles been doing this for a couple years now? http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/translate-real-worl...

forgotusername• 14 years ago

This isn't quite as slick as how word lens does it. Google's translation is likely better, but Word Lens superimposes the translated text back into place on the original image.

Anyone tried to install it on a stock 2.3.3 Nexus One and been told it's incompatible?

jeztek8• 14 years ago

Yep, we were sad about that one. The hardware is up to spec but there's something about the GPU driver that's causing the N1 to perform poorly.

nja• 14 years ago

Most of the time, in my experience, goggles fails to even recognize it as text to translate, because it tries to identify objects, too.

51Cards• 14 years ago

Have been waiting for this to come to Android for awhile now but sadly it doesn't seem to want to install on my Nexus One. Says it only requires Android 2.3.3+ and I have 2.3.6. Oh well, add another reason on the pile to replace this phone despite still loving it over the new Nexus models.

jeztek8• 14 years ago

Yeah, we wanted to support the Nexus One, and the hardware meets the minimum requirements but we encountered weird performance issues likely related to the graphics driver.

saddino• 14 years ago

Conversation here on whether this would be a good acquisition for Google just got me thinking about Google's motivation behind Glass (a bit off-topic):

1) Google can (easily) make the argument that it needs to sample the image stream from every headset along with GPS/gyro to recognize "what you are looking at." These samples would be stored (of course).

2) Each sample can be OCR'd to recognize signage and contextual strings for searching that particular frame (e.g. thinking of every frame as a "web page").

3) Google can then "index the real world" with the image and contextual data.

Forget sending cars around taking photos. With enough users wearing headsets, Gooogle can build a searchable, virtual representation of the physical world.

And to get back on-topic: I'm surprised that the Word Lens guys didn't think of this (not the image mapping, but the signage/contextual mapping). Or maybe they have...

mtgx2• 14 years ago

I'd love for Google to buy them and combine them with the Google Goggles team so they do something similar to the "offline voice" that they made for JellyBean. In the same way you could use the "full engine" when connected through the Internet (Google Goggles), but also still be able to do 80% of it offline through something like Word Lens.

Ineffable• 14 years ago

I have no doubt that at some point Google will start building some sort of integration between Glass and Street View. They're already starting to do what you're talking about with street view data - they're using ReCAPTCHA to OCR street signs and house numbers to try to get more accurate address information for maps.

moe4• 14 years ago

Unrelated rant: Dear Google, can you please add QR-Codes to the web play-store.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

Why? You can just press "Install" and it instantly starts downloading on your phone?

moe4• 14 years ago

Only if I login and thereby allow google to connect my mobile profile with my browsing profile. Which I decidedly don't want.

moe4• 14 years ago

Does this work right for anyone?

For me the words don't stay put. It flickers constantly, making it near impossible to read.

frankdenbow• 14 years ago

Does the same for me, but you can press the pause button to get a snapshot.

jamengual• 14 years ago

I like the idea but the translations to Spanish are terrible.

reustle• 14 years ago

I don't understand how this isn't compatible with my device (google play won't even let me install). I have an HTC EVO. It can't be a hardware power thing, if the iTouch runs it fine.

jeztek8• 14 years ago

Sometimes the hardware meets the minimum specs but other issues like buggy drivers lead us to have to blacklist a device.

covercash• 14 years ago

Any chance of getting a version that recognizes a url, email, twitter handle, etc. and makes them clickable? Goodbye QR codes!

zaptheimpaler• 14 years ago

Word Lens + Auto Captions = Instant Subtitles in EVERY language. OMGBBQ.

Introducing Word Lens, for Android

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