Feature Request: Word Lens
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This is pretty cool, actually - the framerates would be a little dicey if we tried it now, though, recognizing alphabetic languages is a lot easier than recognizing Chinese. (framerates are why we currently only recognize characters inside of the magic green box) The translation part would be a little challenging too - even if we could come up with a decent real-time translator, the output it generated would be a whole lot wordier than the Chinese and you'd be left with really tiny English translations that barely fit on the screen.
But in theory, we know what the characters are, we know where they are in the image and we can easily detect what colors they're being drawn in, so this wouldn't even be that difficult if we could get the performance and translation quality up to snuff.
Definitely makes me feel good about not wasting time adding OCR support for English, though.
But in theory, we know what the characters are, we know where they are in the image and we can easily detect what colors they're being drawn in, so this wouldn't even be that difficult if we could get the performance and translation quality up to snuff.
Definitely makes me feel good about not wasting time adding OCR support for English, though.
I have a feeling they concentrated on signs for a reason--I'm not sure this app would do well on a page of text. But that does not mean it's not useful--I think most casual users of iPhone dictionaries are not language learners, but travelers that are trying to look up signs and things like that.
Just tried it out - a good bit less smooth in practice, and it really is more of a word-by-word translation thing, but certainly might be worth experimenting with displaying the translations right there. Seems to get frustrated by documents with lots of text in them - slows down and eventually boxes them off to only take up half of the display.
One other thing that concerns me about this for Chinese is that it's going to be a lot harder to confirm that we saw a given character correctly without the overlay, and much more disastrous if we don't (given that similar-looking characters can have very different meanings) - the extra confirmation of the character overlay may be necessary in our case.
On the plus side, the Techcrunch piece on this mentioned us:
and linked to our website rather than our iTunes page, so a nice little SEO bump there.
One other thing that concerns me about this for Chinese is that it's going to be a lot harder to confirm that we saw a given character correctly without the overlay, and much more disastrous if we don't (given that similar-looking characters can have very different meanings) - the extra confirmation of the character overlay may be necessary in our case.
On the plus side, the Techcrunch piece on this mentioned us:
and linked to our website rather than our iTunes page, so a nice little SEO bump there.
It occurs to me that one very practical place to do something like this would be for simplified<>traditional conversion - something to let people from HK/Taiwan point their iPhones at signs they encounter in the mainland and see their traditional-character versions, e.g. Maybe not as impressive a tech demo as this, but a lot more accurate and useful (though I suppose most native Chinese speakers are reasonably comfortable with both character sets).
And we just had our best OCR sales day in ~2 weeks, so searches from people looking for a similar app for Chinese do seem to have given us a little boost - nice way to finish off the first year of Pleco on iPhone anyway. (today happened to be our 1-year App Store anniversary)
And we just had our best OCR sales day in ~2 weeks, so searches from people looking for a similar app for Chinese do seem to have given us a little boost - nice way to finish off the first year of Pleco on iPhone anyway. (today happened to be our 1-year App Store anniversary)
Looks like the Word Lens guys are now getting slammed with 1-star reviews much like we did, but quite a few of them are actually writing to say that it's because the app isn't really free, so that would seem to confirm the theory about where those 99 1-star Pleco reviews came from. And reduce the likelihood that they'll reappear in 2.2.2.
Yesterday was an even better OCR sales day, so I'd venture to say that after the creators of Word Lens and, of course, Apple, the company that's made the 3rd most amount of money from this product and its attendant buzz is us
So 谢谢 to you guys for creating interest in this category. (and please don't be in any great hurry to add support for Chinese...)
Yesterday was an even better OCR sales day, so I'd venture to say that after the creators of Word Lens and, of course, Apple, the company that's made the 3rd most amount of money from this product and its attendant buzz is us
So 谢谢 to you guys for creating interest in this category. (and please don't be in any great hurry to add support for Chinese...)