Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language.
Of course, that's not possible today — but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress engineers from Google demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but I thought I'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies.
In the video below, you'll see how Google use Goggles to take a picture of a German menu and instantly translate the text into English:
You may wonder what's happening in the background. On the simplest level, this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.
Right now this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's not yet ready for prime time. However, it shows a lot of promise for what the future might hold. Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, Google are hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go.
0 comments:
Post a Comment