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Google Translate is a clever piece of technology, as is Google Goggles. Stick them together and traveling aboard just became a whole lot easier.
The Goggles technology for Android handsets already has optical character recognition, meaning it can read signs, menus and other printed information, allowing features such as giving you reviews of a particular bottle of wine and food matching tips.
Now Google has had the brilliantly simple (in hindsight) idea of incorporating that with its Translate application. That means users can simply point their phone camera towards a sign or menu, click the camera icon then click screen, and finally use a brushing motion to highlight the text they want translated.
The translation is then available in both text and simulated speech forms. It’s also possible to have the text spoken out in the original language, the idea being this will help people who, for example, want to order something from a menu in the local language but aren’t sure how to pronounce.
At the moment the OCR function is available in Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Aside from Russian, those all use the same Latin alphabet, albeit with a few additional punctuation symbols.
Google says it is working on other languages, so it will be interesting to see how quickly it can start recognizing Arabic and Chinese writing and how accurate and extensive that recognition is.
It’s not the first time Google has married other technologies with its translation tools. The company has previously worked on combining speech recognition, speech simulation and translation. The idea there is that eventually the whole thing will work quickly enough that two people could have a phone conversation without the need to speak the same language.
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