Word lens – An innovative app for the iPhone

Bonjour!
Guten Morgen!
Buenos días!
Dobroye utro!
Ohayo gozaimasu!
Shubha prabhaat!

Stumbled?  Well there is no reason to feel out of place. There is a new application for the iPhone which offers quick and seamless translation of printed words with élan, and what’s more, all of this happens in real time.

The application is beautiful in a way because it does not make use of any internet based look up for translation and rather does everything based on the inputs fed into it. The software is pretty complex as it makes use of the iPhone’s camera. The user can just point at a placard or a billboard and just take a snapshot and it pretty well translates the printed letters in a language of your choice. This is pretty neat for an application which works in real time.

The free to use app makes use of optical recognition technology and a translation lookup table or a database to translate words on the fly, in real time. The current version can only translate words into Spanish given an input but the app is expected to support more languages in the future.