Google Translate Gets an Impressive New Update Which Includes Augmented Reality Signs & More

[dgstorm]

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Google has out-done themselves again. Their latest update to the already impressive Google Translate takes things to a whole new level of awesome. Not only have they improved the speed at which Google Translate can handle real-world spoken dialog translations, they also included a really slick new capability called Word Lens.

Word Lens is basically an Augmented Reality view which you can use with your smartphone or tablet which instantly translates signs and displays them in your chosen language. To see an example of this new feature, just check out the thread below where we included Google's animated gif of it in action.

Source: Google

 

[dgstorm]

Here's that example of Google Translate's new Word Lens feature:

 

[Jonny Kansas]

Word Lens is pretty slick. I believe I downloaded it shortly after Google purchased it just because they made it free and I wanted to try it. It's trippy how it really does translate words right in the camera viewfinder.

This makes me want to travel abroad that much more.

Wonder how it works if you speak some of each language at the same time, like I know enough Spanish to have small conversations, but I might forget some words and toss their English equivalent in there.

 

[Beardface]

As someone who actually bought Word Lens a couple years back when it was going for I believe $10 on the market, this kind of annoys me to see it freely available to everyone else.

 

[Jonny Kansas]

As someone who actually bought Word Lens a couple years back when it was going for I believe $10 on the market, this kind of annoys me to see it freely available to everyone else.

Unfortunately, that happens quite a lot. The one that always pops into my mind is Swiftkey. I paid a few bucks for it and then they went free and offered all former paid users a pack of themes, none of which suited my taste, so I feel like I donated to their cause, but got exactly what I would've gotten for free if I wasn't an early supporter.