Good Thinking

Word Lens app turns your phone into a real-time translator

View 3 Images
Word Lens uses your phone's camera to read and translate words in real time
Word Lens uses your phone's camera to read and translate words in real time
Word Lens uses OCR to translate the words in an image
Word Lens maintains the colors and fonts in the translated image
View gallery - 3 images

Word Lens translates printed words in real time on your iPhone. Can our jet packs be far behind? Developed by Quest Visual, Word Lens is an augmented-reality translation app that uses your phone's camera to view printed words and translate them into another language as you watch. If you’re traveling for business or on vacation and need to read a street sign or a menu, point your phone and Word Lens instantly translates it, maintaining the color and font as it goes.

Word Lens is currently available for the iPhone via iTunes. The app is free, with languages available for in-app purchase at US$5 each. So far, only Spanish-to-English and English-to-Spanish are available, but Quest Visual has plans to offer additional languages soon. After you purchase the languages, they are downloaded to your phone so you do not need a network connection to use Word Lens.

Word Lens maintains the colors and fonts in the translated image

Quest Visual says the app is as easy to use as taking a picture with your phone. The app offers a zoom feature so you can crop out extraneous details, and a flashlight feature to light up the text if necessary. In addition, you can translate words by typing them in. Word Lens works best on clearly printed text, and does not work with decorative fonts or handwriting.

The app uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to analyze the image and translate the words it finds. You can test out the Word Lens OCR capability in the free app using two cute features that will spell all words in the image backwards, or digitally erase all the words in the image. Like most translators and translation software, Word Lens is not perfect, but Visual Quest promises that you can at least get the general meaning of the text.

Word Lens uses OCR to translate the words in an image

Word Lens works with the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, and iPod Touch with camera, and requires iOS 4.0 or later (The iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch do not support the zoom and flashlight features). There is no official word on an Android version yet.

Quest Visual seems to have a hit on its hands. In its first day of release on iTunes, Word Lens quickly climbed into the top 40 app chart. Hopefully we can look forward to its continued development, with more languages and improved translations. Details are available on iTunes.

View gallery - 3 images
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Flipboard
  • LinkedIn
9 comments
Roomie
This got to come to the Android as well, killer app! Reale good use of augmented reality.
Smokey_Bear
Damn Impressive. I agree with Roomie...it needs to find its way to android.
Andy Barrow
Just got it and tested it. As probably expected, it\'s pretty picky about camera shake, which is hard to control with an iTouch. You can use the pause button to (hopefully) capture, but so far here in Mexico, I haven\'t been able to get it to translate anything particularly well.
I\'m sure as updates come out it will get better. Extremely cool hack, no matter what the current performance issues may be. I\'m hopeful that I\'ll be able to sit in a restaurant, point the thing at a menu and have it show me whats available for supper!
Mr Stiffy
This is brilliant.... it would be even better if according to an earlier poster - that it can achieve a very high accuracy rate.
Facebook User
A step forward for all dedicated travellers, lets hope they succed in getting other languages out as well.
Johan Askham-Sørensen
this app seems very very awesome!! i hope it gets to android
joe.texan
How long until someone makes a \"Beer Goggles\" app that lets you see what she\'s going to look like when you wake up in the morning?
Rick Wagner
Crummy: It doesn't do German so don't bother taking it to Germany when you go...
Muhammad Nabil Hijriyah
Is very amazing. I like it. Hm, what the app can we do it now?