GreenBkk Tech | New iPhone app translates foreign-language signs

New iPhone app translates foreign-language signs

By Mark Milian, CNN

The Word Lens app for the iPhone automatically translates text right in front of you.

(CNN) -- Augmented-reality applications have promised to revolutionize the way we live on-the-go with our smartphones, but none have fully delivered yet.

This may be changing. A new iPhone app called Word Lens shows remarkable promise for helping international travelers.

Word Lens uses the phone's video camera, and the phone's processor, to interpret printed words and almost instantly translate them into another language.

Those traveling abroad could hold the phone in front of their eyes to decipher a foreign-language street sign. The app projects the translated words onto whatever sign you point the phone at.

Google's Goggles app has the capability to translate text or identify objects in an image. But it requires users to take a picture with their phones. Word Lens does it on the fly, meaning it's interpreting frames in video, almost in real time. A similar app called LookTel, designed to help blind people, scans print on objects such as packages of food and reads them aloud.

The Word Lens concept is fascinating, the video demonstration is wonderful; and the app is free and technically advanced.

But this much-talked-about technical wonder is still a work in progress. CNN spent some time with the app, and it's clear that Word Lens developer Quest Visual hasn't fully realized its vision.

The free version of the app can perform a series of demonstrations showing what the technology can do, like matching fonts and erasing text from a scene -- both of which are impressive.

But the current app can only translate between English and Spanish (each language package costs $4.99). Quest Visual says it plans to add dictionaries to support other languages soon. Translations for sentences can also be somewhat crude.

Still, the app may be useful to any traveler trying to decipher a sign or cafe menu in a Spanish-language country, or vice versa.

Credit: CNN (www.cnn.com)