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Let’s all imagine the following situation: you visit a foreign country whose language you don’t speak and you try constantly to understand the written words on buildings, restaurant menus, street signs and so on. How hard is it to get by and still have some fun? And how long does it take to use an online translator to figure out what you are about to eat or to see?
Having a real time word translator at the tips of your fingers is no longer a wish, but a reality. Enter Word Lens, one of the most interesting and futuristic apps available for iOS and Android! What is Word Lens and how does it work? Let’s listen to the specialists describing it:
Word Lens is an augmented reality translation app. Just point your phone camera at a supported foreign language, and Word Lens replaces the foreign text with translated text.
If you see a connection between the powers of this app and Google Translate , your intuition is right: the app would do wonders to the service and it would benefit tremendously from the 345 supported languages and more than 10,000 language pairs sported by Google Translate. Recent news tell us that Google bought Word Lens, for a sum that has been yet undisclosed, in an attempt to power up Google Translate and strengthen its position as the most advanced and powerful translation system in the world.
As a matter of fact, Google bought the entire company producing Word Lens. In an official statement released by Quest Visual, the developers of the app said that
By joining Google, we can incorporate Quest Visual’s technology into Google Translate’s broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future. As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we’ve made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time while we transition to Google.
As you know, Google doesn’t settle for less than it deserves. The World Lens is considered a brilliant invention with applications that go far beyond easing the life of travelers. Back in the day, the CEO of Quest Visual spoke about introducing new tech features to the Word Lens which revolved around reading technology to assist the visually impaired.
There is no wonder that Google got interested in the app and made an offer impossible to refuse. With Google Glass in mind, this app seems to be a game – changer in the business of augmented reality devices and applications. Now that Google bought Word Lens, it is clear that we will see a newer and better version of Google Translate very soon.
