Does Your Android Wear Goggles?
Phones That Can See, Read, and Translate (aka “My Phone Is Smarter Than Me”.)
Here’s how it works:
* Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
* Press the shutter button
* If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
* Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.
Wow. Could I have uses that French class.
What am I talking about? Google Goggles is an “mobile app” that combines OCR (optical character recognition) with Google’s ability to translate languages — which gives your phone’s camera the ability to read French (for example), and tell you what that item on the menu is (for example).
Is this something out of James Bond fiction? Nope. Just another example of The Future Is Here Now.
Google Goggles (currently) requires Android 1.6, and “can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages.” To find out more, see, Official Google Mobile Blog: Translate the real world with Google Goggles.
… eventually, we will all be wearing OCR cameras (maybe built into eyeglasses), and have Wi Fi/4G wireless transponders (woven into our clothes?), and have chips in our brain which contain dictionaries of all known languages… and using a phone to translate a foreign language sentence will seem quaint. Like Atari’s Pong.
But that’s probably 20 years off. In the meantime, there’s Google Goggles.
Amazing.
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• About Tech Paul
I am a Retired computer & network technician. I used to think the machines were pretty cool. Now I don’t.
They’re anything but.
I regularly posted how-to’s and tricks & tips and general computing advice here starting in 2007. (Use the Search tool to find answers. But be aware, many are rather dated.) Sometimes I answered (your) specific questions in an article if I believed the answer was generally helpful to “everyone”. All the writing you see was my own, typos and all. There always is/was an implied “IMHO” in what you see here.
Note: You are responsible for using this blog and its content. I am in no way liable for any losses caused by user error, viruses and/or other malware, hardware or software failure, or any other conceivable reason.
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