3 ms·
A lot of people must have thought of making OCR iPhone apps. But the idea of using OCR to do real-time language translation superposed on the original backgroun
by revorad 16y ago
A lot of people must have thought of making OCR iPhone apps. But the idea of using OCR to do real-time language translation superposed on the original background image? That's genius. I hadn't thought of it. Did you?
At least in my limited experience, deciding what to work on is really important.
Acknowledging great ideas doesn't take away anything from their superb execution.
- jodrellblank 16y agoI hadn't thought of it. Did you? I did: "One that I've mentioned in almost every post here for ages, a service that I can take a photo, it does OCR and feeds the text into Google translate. Bonus points if it does source-language-detection. More bonus points if it is actually usable in a foreign country on real live things like signposts, menus, timetables, advertisements, book covers, leaflets, etc." - me, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569838 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=569838 Nearly two years ago, travelling in a foreign country with an iPhone, knowing Google Translate existed, knowing OCR existed, and not being able to do anything with that knowledge. (It's so rare that I hit this kind of advance view on things I'm going to be shamelessly happy about it. NB, I'm not claiming anything here - I couldn't write it and didn't try).
- Alan01252 16y agoMy work colleague also had this exact idea, and told me about it in the hopes I could code something to do the job. There was just no way I had the time/resources/skill to make something like this.