Google Googles Translates Pictured Text

Google Goggles is offering a new feature; take a picture of a sign, menu or other foreign language text, and Google Goggles will translate it for you.

Here’s how it works:
  • Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
  • Press the shutter button
  • If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.

    Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities to other Latin-based languages. Our goal is to eventually read non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.

Technovelgy readers may recall the Nokia cameraphone application called Shoot to Translate from 2008, which worked only from Chinese to English.

Science fiction writers have been enamored with the idea of machine translation of human language since the speech rectifier from Hugo Gernsback's 1911 classic Ralph 124c 41 +. More recently, Dr. Who fans recall that the TARDIS is able to instantly understand every language in all of time and space.

Via Google Mobile Blog.

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