New, more powerful Google Translate app

https://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2015/01/hallo-hola-ola-to-new-more-powerful_14.html

by caio1982 • 12 years ago

313 91 12 years ago

googletranslate.blogspot.com

jamesjyu• 12 years ago

The conversation feature is pretty phenomenal, and comes close to a true Babelfish device. I just tried it with English<->Mandarin with my wife (we both speak fluently), and works pretty accurately and is fast.

I will definitely use this when traveling.

Someone1234• 12 years ago

Am I correct in assuming it requires a good fast internet connection to work at all? For example does it even work on 2G or is it WiFi only?

zavi• 12 years ago

It works offline.

seszett• 12 years ago

It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.

You actually have to translate both sentences into English to understand how they somewhat mean the same thing when taken literally (but that's just the same problem as on translate.google.com)

pimlottc• 12 years ago

It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.

You might prefer to say "imperfect" instead of "perfectible". While "perfectible" is a, well, perfectly good word, it is unusually rare enough that I thought you had meant to say "perfect" and made an error. "imperfect" is much more common and less likely to be misinterpreted. Apologies for the unsolicited criticism but I really was confused by this at first.

syllogism2• 12 years ago

I don't know whether they have a specific French <--> Chinese model. They might, they might not.

It's hard to train for all n^2 language pairs, so MT systems usually back off to English as a pivot language. i.e., they'll translate French --> English --> Chinese.

fma• 12 years ago

I just tried English<->Mandarin with my wife...though not always grammatically correct, it gets the point across.

For those who would use it while travelling abroad, keep it mind this requires an Internet connection. In China, you would need VPN since Google services are blocked.

shittyanalogy• 12 years ago

You can download the language for offline usage, at least in android

Wogef• 12 years ago

Baidu translate works great in China and will translate anything you copy to the clipboard automatically. Requires the usual insane Chinese app permissions so Xprivacy or something similar is a must.

kennyledet• 12 years ago

The conversation feature is pretty phenomenal,

Yeah, it is. I had pretty much the same idea a few years back, and called it "SpaceChat". I ended up dropping the project because I was too busy with other things. Smh.

ape4• 12 years ago

Poor news for Word Lens https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisua...

th0br0• 12 years ago

Why poor news? Google bought Quest Visual (the company behind Word Lens) some time ago.

magicalist4• 12 years ago

In fact, the blog post subheading for that section is "Instant translation with Word Lens"

I'm curious if that part has improved with integration with Google's Translate. The video-based translated word substitution was amazing, but my understanding was that it was doing a very simple translation in the original app, essentially a word at a time.

zobzu• 12 years ago

the new google translate stuff is world lens. like, that is world lens code inside.

m1117• 12 years ago

It doesn't translate to indian english and to japanese english...

atian• 12 years ago

The word lens is impressive. Tried it out on my university ID against some bright light, and it was able to detect even the low-contrast regions. Even my Mac keyboard. It works on almost anything.

It doesn't work on Chinese quite yet.

thehodge• 12 years ago

Word Lens was the first iPhone app that I saw that really felt like Magic, glad to see it was bought up and put infront of a mass audience (where I assume it will gather data and learn)

NamTaf• 12 years ago

Precisely my thinking. I was wondering what'd happened to Word Lens and so to see them baked in to the Google engine is really exciting. Great work and congratulations!

Igglyboo• 12 years ago

Totally agree. It's the first time in many years where I was genuinely surprised at the capabilities of a computer.

oska• 12 years ago

(where I assume it will gather data and learn)

Yes, if you look in the settings the following option appears:

☑ Improve camera input (Allow Google to retain your images related to translation)

It is set on by default.

ak217• 12 years ago

Congrats to Otavio and crew for bringing Word Lens all the way to such a spectacular success.

AndrewKemendo• 12 years ago

Word Lens was the first iPhone app that I saw that really felt like Magic

When Augmented Reality works correctly, that's how it should feel.

dreen• 12 years ago

Unfortunately crashes on my Nexus 5 when trying to take a picture :(

nanexcool• 12 years ago

I speak English, Spanish and Italian. I've been talking to this app for the past hour in those languages and translating to whatever languages have speech output. This is so amazing.

johansch• 12 years ago

Before this they kept the Android app a lot more powerful. Are the iOS and Android apps finally on par now?

bla2• 12 years ago

I doubt that was an intentional strategy. Google seems to not push worse apps to iOS in general. The new Maps UI launched on iOS first, for example.

finishingmove• 12 years ago

Meanwhile on Windows Phone, we have YouTube blocked. Anyway, I have to admit Google Translate is phenomenal now, even though it's thanks to the guys behind Word Lens. Kudos to everyone involved. This is probably going to be one of my most used apps from now on.

0942v8653• 12 years ago

As cool as the new features are, the app is now difficult and slow to use the way I used to. Little things, like focusing the textbox when you tap clear, are just missing. I'm willing to take that for the automatic OCR features, but it's just worse for everything else (probably due to their new "Material Design" strategy which doesn't belong on iOS).

datashovel• 12 years ago

If they haven't already started doing this, it seems it would be inevitable, to turn this into a full-fledged API for use in real-time communications, like WebRTC apps, etc...

I see that they have an API, but not sure how feasible it would be to use in real-time apps.

ex0r• 12 years ago

Some friends and I actually did something like this at a hackathon. We built a Google Hangouts app that used Google's translate API for real-time video conferencing in different languages.

joshstrange• 12 years ago

I work on software that, among other things, runs a call center and I've been getting requests to do something like this in real time so that we can communicate with our users that don't speak english (We have agents who speak other languages but they wanted a fallback for when they weren't there). I told them real-time was still a little bit out (even with this as an API it would take time to integrate). This is really exciting though and I look forward to the day that we can do this will little to no lag and talk to people who don't share a language in common.

unholiness• 12 years ago

Unfortunately, all of their text-recognition is still done on the cloud. So If you're traveling, you most likely won't have a data plan in the country you're visiting, and word lens won't work. This seems like a huge missing piece to me.

It's strange because they let you download language packs so that all the translation (and voice recognition) can be done locally. I have no knowledge in this area, but honestly: is there something fundamental about text recognition that it can't be done client-side?

teraflop• 12 years ago

is there something fundamental about text recognition that it can't be done client-side?

Since the blog post talks about how Google Translate now does client-side text recognition, I suspect the answer to this question is "no".

nness2• 12 years ago

Nowadays Pocket Wifi's or data SIMs for your phone/tablet are fairly cheap and ubiquitous, if you're travelling to the parts of the world supported by the feature, you'll likely have a decent connection.

bucketsofdirt• 12 years ago

Google Translate came pre-installed on my handy, but since data is expensive- at least here in Germany- I removed it and defaulted to an offline German <=> English dictionary. After reading this post and watching the video I decided I'd give it another go and I'm glad I did.

In order to do translation w/out using data each and every time you have to:

1. Open the Translate app

2. Tap the options icon; top right

3. Tap "Settings"

4. Tap "Manage Offline Languages"

5. Select the language you would like available offline and how you'd like to download it( wifi only, wifi 3G, etc )

The German language pack is about 300mb, but that's nothing compared to the cost over time of using the app; data cost. Let's just hope they don't pull a SketchUp with this.

tonydiv• 12 years ago

Congratulations to Otavio and the Word Lens team, I'm excited to see this in the Google Translate app.

salimmadjd• 12 years ago

Yeah, I noticed they finally pulled in Otavio's Word Lens into google translate after they acquired him.

hngiszmo• 12 years ago

Know what's funny? "This is fucking funny!"

(try it)

ronnier• 12 years ago

This is Amazing. Very helpful here in Japan. I'll be glad when the word lens feature supports Japanese.

tuananh• 12 years ago

OCR is really fast and accurate. Impressive.

covi• 12 years ago

Really curious about the tech / arch. behind its ASR. Must have a lot of nodes and tricks in place to support high throughput and low latency.

If I'm not mistaken, this paper [1] is the last time Google published about the related architecture. We know very little about improvements over the last 7 years.

[1] http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090

choppaface• 12 years ago

The original word lens app was much closer to a hashmap of words in language src to dest.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15656331/real-time-image-...

afsina• 12 years ago

AFAIK there are several new advancements for both ASR and Translation front. DBN and Special RNN called LSTM based systems surpassed classical approaches. A recent Translation mechanism based on LSTM from Google: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learni...

ninguem2• 12 years ago

English <-> Portuguese needs some work. I had an hilarious conversation with myself.

joezydeco• 12 years ago

I'm just amazed this runs on my iPhone 4. Brilliant upgrade.

nness2• 12 years ago

Having just spent a month travelling through Japan, I can attest to the brilliance of the Translate app even before this update! That said, the Android version seems more feature rich than the iOS version (maybe I just don't know where to look for the features)

minthd• 12 years ago

What are the differences between the versions ?

Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?

yohui• 12 years ago

Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?

Are they "legally allowed"? Why wouldn't it be legal?

Ask the same question with regards to Apple and iOS, and the answer is patently clear.

lione• 12 years ago

Companies are free to only release wherever they want. The legal aspect is when your phone depends on an appstore that refuses to allow competition in (I.E, if Android only allowed Google Maps and not any others). That's the anti-trust illegal aspect.

nicklo• 12 years ago

Google has published a lot of work recently about using deep learning for language translation with really impressive results. Anyone know if Google Translate is now neural net based? Or would a many-layered net not scale to the amount of API calls that Google translate receives?

Aissen• 12 years ago

Do we know the Word Lens (Quest Visual) acquisition price in the end ?

ballpoint• 12 years ago

It would be really cool if they could recognise the font (or a close match) and display the translated words in almost the same style.

kornakiewicz• 12 years ago

Cool, but pretty useless.

okasaki• 12 years ago

The photo translation doesn't work offline for me. I downloaded the languages but when I take a photo it just says "no network". I can mark the text but nothing happens.

dzhiurgis3• 12 years ago

So what languages are actually supported in conversation mode?

Few months ago spoken Thai input was not supported.

Also, World Lens works nothing like in the animation. The app scans for words and provides translation in a traditional UI, it does not overlay translation over the image.

ceejayoz2• 12 years ago

The Google Translate app (and Word Lens, I believe - it's been a few years since I played with it) do use augmented reality to overlay directly on the image.

dzhiurgis3• 12 years ago

Not on my phone. Shows square [align text] which does not disappear.

sibbl• 12 years ago

Works pretty well, but so does Microsoft's Translation app for Windows Phone. Having used Microsoft's app for 2 years now, I am really wondering what took Google so long. Google's app offers coloring of the translation and a way more languages. But in the end, it's as fast and reliable as Microsoft's solution on my devices..

asyncwords• 12 years ago

For those wondering, the app is called "Translator". I've also found the translation to be pretty good, though it tends to trip when it comes to handwriting.

https://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/translator/2cb7...

anonymousDan2• 12 years ago

I wonder when they'll integrate it with google glass to allow e.g. realtime subtitles for when people are talking to you in a foreign language.

New, more powerful Google Translate app

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