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Introducing Word Lens, for Android
- FelixP 14y agoThis is incredible. We're living in the future!
- mondras 14y agonice!
- mootothemax 14y agoI 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 14y agoIt isn't compatible with my Droid X either, which surprised me. Play doesn't tell me why, which is inconvenient.
- mattbot5000 14y agoReally? It's compatible with my Droid X.
- jeztek 14y agoWe haven't blacklisted the Droid X. Can you let us know what kind of problems you're seeing?
- mtgx 14y agoI'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.
- jeztek 14y agoYep, that's correct, critical sections of the pipeline are coded in assembly. Also, Word Lens only works with Android devices that have NEON support.
- abecedarius 14y agoThat needs to be explained somewhere obvious. On the market page it only tells me the app is incompatible with my device, giving me no clue what to get that would run it (except for the OS versions, which my device satisfied).
- jeztek 14y agoWe considered publishing a list of minimum requirements but we encountered phones that for whatever reason wouldn't work even though the hardware met the minimum requirements. For example, the Nexus One and HTC Evo both had low frame rates despite adequate hardware.
- baconner 14y agoNot compatible with the n1 either which is pretty rare. I wonder why...
- jeztek 14y agoWe 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 14y agosweet!
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoWHOA! How freakin' cool would this be on Google Glasses when traveling abroad! Everywhere you look... the text is just translated for you.
- inkaudio 14y agoI 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 https://twitter.com/inkaudio/status/195677653049683969
- s_henry_paulson 14y agoAn acquisition would only make sense if they had relevant patents to purchase, which they do not.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoNot always. While it is highly likely that Google could hire (or already has) the talent to build the same thing, acquiring a finished product and the talent that built it can be cheaper and faster than DIY. But yes, having a patent would make a deal even sweeter.
- inkaudio 14y agoDon't underestimate the amount of work, expertise and experience required to arrive at word lens, to date I've to yet to see this technology duplicated elsewhere. Google has acquire hire before recently with milk inc, I don't see why they can't with this team.
- iandanforth 14y agoThis. Wordlens is computationally intensive and required a significant amount of GPU knowledge to get working in the first place, and then a couple revs of the iPhone before the hardware caught up. Otavio has some serious graphics chops that made the product possible.
- s_henry_paulson 14y agoAs 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.
- jeztek 14y agoHi 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 14y agoTwo years is an awful long time to go from iOS to Android.
- veemjeem 14y agoNot a long time when you consider how long it took them to write their first release.
- cpeterso 14y agoHow long did the initial iOS release take?
- bdcravens 14y agoWhy 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 14y agoI'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 14y agoHasn't google goggles been doing this for a couple years now? http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/translate-real-world-with-google.html http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/translate-real-worl...
- forgotusername 14y agoThis 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?
- jeztek 14y agoYep, 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 14y agoMost of the time, in my experience, goggles fails to even recognize it as text to translate, because it tries to identify objects, too.
- 51Cards 14y agoHave 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.
- jeztek 14y agoYeah, 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 14y agoConversation 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...
- mtgx 14y agoI'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 14y agoI 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.
- moe 14y agoUnrelated rant: Dear Google, can you please add QR-Codes to the web play-store.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoWhy? You can just press "Install" and it instantly starts downloading on your phone?
- moe 14y agoOnly if I login and thereby allow google to connect my mobile profile with my browsing profile. Which I decidedly don't want.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago... what? You're already logged into a Google account on your phone. Or do you really have different account for your phone, thereby foregoing the biggest advantage of having an Android phone (sync with all of the Google services)?
- moe 14y agoI don't use any Google services other than Search. I have no interest in giving them more information than absolutely needed.
- moe 14y agoDoes this work right for anyone? For me the words don't stay put. It flickers constantly, making it near impossible to read.
- frankdenbow 14y agoDoes the same for me, but you can press the pause button to get a snapshot.
- jamengual 14y agoI like the idea but the translations to Spanish are terrible.
- reustle 14y agoI 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.
- jeztek 14y agoSometimes the hardware meets the minimum specs but other issues like buggy drivers lead us to have to blacklist a device.
- covercash 14y agoAny chance of getting a version that recognizes a url, email, twitter handle, etc. and makes them clickable? Goodbye QR codes!
- zaptheimpaler 14y agoWord Lens + Auto Captions = Instant Subtitles in EVERY language. OMGBBQ.