12 ms·

New, more powerful Google Translate app

313 points by caio1982 12y ago

jamesjyu 12y 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 12y 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?
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - zavi 12y ago
    It works offline.
    - ma2rten 12y ago
      Google put it's translation engine into the client? I doubt that.
      - cryptoz 12y ago
        They've been able to do offline voice-to-text, for English at least, for the last 1-2 years, so it's possible. But I would tend to agree...seems doubtful that they could have best-in-class real-time translations....offline, right?
        rancur 12y ago
        and yet that never works for me. the offline bit
      - croddin 12y ago
        Yeah it looks like they did: • Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently available in: English ↔ French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish. (From https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.translate&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... )
        Mahn 12y ago
        That's amazing. Major kudos to the Google Translate team if it really does work fully offline.
        alextgordon 12y ago
        The live video translation was a startup that they acquired ("Word Lens"). It already worked offline so it would be strange if they had removed that feature. I doubt this implies that the Google translation engine has been ported to work offline.
        magicalist 12y ago
        It does and has for some time[1]. Just switch to airplane mode and try it before asserting this? You have to download the language packs first, but it works. [1] http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-languages-in-your-pocket-no.html http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-langu...
        anonymousDan 12y ago
        Does anyone know of any equivalent open source systems for the word lens or audio translate apps? Or even what kind of algs they are using?
      - sbrother 12y ago
        The translation quality won't be (anywhere near) as good offline as online, but it works well enough for word lens to be useful without a data connection!
      - taejo 12y ago
        The "Google Translate" app has supported offline translation for "pinned" languages for a while now.
- seszett 12y 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 12y 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.
    - jessedhillon 12y ago
      Yeah, the similar English sentiment would be "it could be better" or "leaves a lot to be desired"
    - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
      it was the perfect word choice to illustrate translation difficulty
      - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
        True, but "really perfectible" sounds strange.
        sfeng 12y ago
        That's his point
        reacweb 12y ago
        It sounds strange in english. Saying "c'est perfectible" in french is correct and usual. It is translated by google translate into "This is perfectible". As usual, google translate is very poor.
- fma 12y 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 12y ago
    You can download the language for offline usage, at least in android
    - chris_overseas 12y ago
      That only works for the (amazing) WordLens functionality. Live audio translation still requires Google's cloud for processing.
      - agildehaus 12y ago
        WordLens works offline without any additional downloads, at least for the languages I tried (Spanish, French, English). Audio translation and TTS works offline if you have the proper languages downloaded, but being able to detect what language is being spoken seems to be an online-only feature.
  - Wogef 12y 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.
    - Kiro 12y ago
      But Baidu doesn't have the Babelfish.
- kennyledet 12y 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 12y ago
Poor news for Word Lens https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisual.wordlens.demo&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisua...
- th0br0 12y ago
  Why poor news? Google bought Quest Visual (the company behind Word Lens) some time ago.
  - magicalist 12y 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.
    - bobbles 12y ago
      Word-at-a-time use was perfect for me travelling around europe, as basically all I wanted it for was translating signs
      - magicalist 12y ago
        Yeah, it works for most of the cases where you'd want to use something like Word Lens. I was more just wondering how deep the new integration goes.
- zobzu 12y ago
  the new google translate stuff is world lens. like, that is world lens code inside.
m1117 12y ago
It doesn't translate to indian english and to japanese english...
atian 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
  Totally agree. It's the first time in many years where I was genuinely surprised at the capabilities of a computer.
- oska 12y 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 12y ago
  Congrats to Otavio and crew for bringing Word Lens all the way to such a spectacular success.
- AndrewKemendo 12y 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 12y ago
Unfortunately crashes on my Nexus 5 when trying to take a picture :(
nanexcool 12y 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 12y ago
Before this they kept the Android app a lot more powerful. Are the iOS and Android apps finally on par now?
- bla2 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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".
- nness 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Congratulations to Otavio and the Word Lens team, I'm excited to see this in the Google Translate app.
- salimmadjd 12y ago
  Yeah, I noticed they finally pulled in Otavio's Word Lens into google translate after they acquired him.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hngiszmo 12y ago
Know what's funny? "This is fucking funny!" (try it)
ronnier 12y ago
This is Amazing. Very helpful here in Japan. I'll be glad when the word lens feature supports Japanese.
tuananh 12y ago
OCR is really fast and accurate. Impressive.
covi 12y 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 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090
- choppaface 12y 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-processing-ocr http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15656331/real-time-image-...
- afsina 12y 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-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learni...
ninguem2 12y ago
English <-> Portuguese needs some work. I had an hilarious conversation with myself.
joezydeco 12y ago
I'm just amazed this runs on my iPhone 4. Brilliant upgrade.
nness 12y 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 12y ago
  What are the differences between the versions ? Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?
  - yohui 12y 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.
    - rancur 12y ago
      > Why wouldn't it be legal? don't waste your brain capacity on stupid people there are too many of them
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - lione 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Do we know the Word Lens (Quest Visual) acquisition price in the end ?
ballpoint 12y 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 12y ago
  Cool, but pretty useless.
okasaki 12y 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.
dzhiurgis 12y 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.
- ceejayoz 12y 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.
  - dzhiurgis 12y ago
    Not on my phone. Shows square [align text] which does not disappear.
    - ceejayoz 12y ago
      Mine: https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/1782134_10100531027259617_6962033440903244379_n.jpg?oh=a2b3dd6a7f42a0e2667cc0142339ef01&oe=5533BD86 https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/17...
      - dzhiurgis 12y ago
        It could be it behaves differently on older iPhone.
sibbl 12y 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 12y 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/2cb7cda1-17d8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e https://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/translator/2cb7...
anonymousDan 12y 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.

313 points by caio1982 12y 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 12y 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?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- zavi 12y ago
  It works offline.
  - ma2rten 12y ago
    Google put it's translation engine into the client? I doubt that.
    - cryptoz 12y ago
      They've been able to do offline voice-to-text, for English at least, for the last 1-2 years, so it's possible. But I would tend to agree...seems doubtful that they could have best-in-class real-time translations....offline, right?
      - rancur 12y ago
        and yet that never works for me. the offline bit
    - croddin 12y ago
      Yeah it looks like they did: • Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently available in: English ↔ French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish. (From https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.translate&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... )
      - Mahn 12y ago
        That's amazing. Major kudos to the Google Translate team if it really does work fully offline.
        alextgordon 12y ago
        The live video translation was a startup that they acquired ("Word Lens"). It already worked offline so it would be strange if they had removed that feature. I doubt this implies that the Google translation engine has been ported to work offline.
        magicalist 12y ago
        It does and has for some time[1]. Just switch to airplane mode and try it before asserting this? You have to download the language packs first, but it works. [1] http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-languages-in-your-pocket-no.html http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-langu...
      - anonymousDan 12y ago
        Does anyone know of any equivalent open source systems for the word lens or audio translate apps? Or even what kind of algs they are using?
    - sbrother 12y ago
      The translation quality won't be (anywhere near) as good offline as online, but it works well enough for word lens to be useful without a data connection!
    - taejo 12y ago
      The "Google Translate" app has supported offline translation for "pinned" languages for a while now.
seszett 12y 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 12y 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.
  - jessedhillon 12y ago
    Yeah, the similar English sentiment would be "it could be better" or "leaves a lot to be desired"
  - MarkPNeyer 12y ago
    it was the perfect word choice to illustrate translation difficulty
    - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
      True, but "really perfectible" sounds strange.
      - sfeng 12y ago
        That's his point
      - reacweb 12y ago
        It sounds strange in english. Saying "c'est perfectible" in french is correct and usual. It is translated by google translate into "This is perfectible". As usual, google translate is very poor.
fma 12y 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 12y ago
  You can download the language for offline usage, at least in android
  - chris_overseas 12y ago
    That only works for the (amazing) WordLens functionality. Live audio translation still requires Google's cloud for processing.
    - agildehaus 12y ago
      WordLens works offline without any additional downloads, at least for the languages I tried (Spanish, French, English). Audio translation and TTS works offline if you have the proper languages downloaded, but being able to detect what language is being spoken seems to be an online-only feature.
- Wogef 12y 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.
  - Kiro 12y ago
    But Baidu doesn't have the Babelfish.
kennyledet 12y 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 12y ago

Poor news for Word Lens https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisual.wordlens.demo&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisua...

th0br0 12y ago
Why poor news? Google bought Quest Visual (the company behind Word Lens) some time ago.
- magicalist 12y 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.
  - bobbles 12y ago
    Word-at-a-time use was perfect for me travelling around europe, as basically all I wanted it for was translating signs
    - magicalist 12y ago
      Yeah, it works for most of the cases where you'd want to use something like Word Lens. I was more just wondering how deep the new integration goes.
zobzu 12y ago
the new google translate stuff is world lens. like, that is world lens code inside.

m1117 12y ago

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

atian 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago
Totally agree. It's the first time in many years where I was genuinely surprised at the capabilities of a computer.
oska 12y 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 12y ago
Congrats to Otavio and crew for bringing Word Lens all the way to such a spectacular success.
AndrewKemendo 12y 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 12y ago

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

nanexcool 12y 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 12y ago

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

bla2 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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".
nness 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

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

salimmadjd 12y ago
Yeah, I noticed they finally pulled in Otavio's Word Lens into google translate after they acquired him.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hngiszmo 12y ago

Know what's funny? "This is fucking funny!" (try it)

ronnier 12y ago

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

tuananh 12y ago

OCR is really fast and accurate. Impressive.

covi 12y 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 http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090

choppaface 12y 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-processing-ocr http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15656331/real-time-image-...
afsina 12y 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-learning-with-neural-networks.pdf http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learni...

ninguem2 12y ago

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

joezydeco 12y ago

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

nness 12y 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 12y ago
What are the differences between the versions ? Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?
- yohui 12y 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.
  - rancur 12y ago
    > Why wouldn't it be legal? don't waste your brain capacity on stupid people there are too many of them
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- lione 12y 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 12y 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 12y ago

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

ballpoint 12y 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 12y ago
Cool, but pretty useless.

okasaki 12y 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.

dzhiurgis 12y 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.

ceejayoz 12y 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.
- dzhiurgis 12y ago
  Not on my phone. Shows square [align text] which does not disappear.
  - ceejayoz 12y ago
    Mine: https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/1782134_10100531027259617_6962033440903244379_n.jpg?oh=a2b3dd6a7f42a0e2667cc0142339ef01&oe=5533BD86 https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xfa1/v/t1.0-9/17...
    - dzhiurgis 12y ago
      It could be it behaves differently on older iPhone.

sibbl 12y 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 12y 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/2cb7cda1-17d8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e https://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/translator/2cb7...

anonymousDan 12y 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.