Friday, July 31, 2015

Google App now offers instant visual translations in 27 languages

If you have a smartphone camera and need to translate printed text from English to Hindi, all you need to do is open the Google Translate App, click on the camera, and point it at the text. Bingo! Your job is done.

The upgraded version of the app, announced by Google on Thursday, will now allow instant visual translations of printed text in 27 languages, including Hindi.

“It could be anything — a street sign, a hoarding, an ingredient list, an instruction manual, dials on a washing machine or text from a newspaper or book. Users will instantly see the text transform live on their screens into their preferred language,” Google said in statement, adding that no internet connection or cell phone data is required.

The company said the new features come from extensive research to develop so-called “convolutional neural networks”, or using artificial intelligence to recognise letters and words and filter out backgrounds. Google said it is updating the app by expanding the instant visual translation to 20 additional languages (seven are already available), and making real-time voice translations faster and smoother.

The original seven languages are English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. On Thursday, Google added 20 more — Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Filipino, Finnish, Hungarian, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian. Also users can now translate English printed text into Hindi and Thai.

Barak Turovsky, Product Lead, Google Translate said in a blog post, “The Google Translate App will knock down a few more language barriers, helping users communicate better and get the information they need, real time and without a data connection.”

Source | Business Line | 31 July 2015

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