

New, more powerful Google Translate app - caio1982
https://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2015/01/hallo-hola-ola-to-new-more-powerful_14.html

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jamesjyu
The conversation feature is pretty phenomenal, and comes close to a true
Babelfish device. I just tried it with English<->Mandarin with my wife (we
both speak fluently), and works pretty accurately and is fast.

I will definitely use this when traveling.

~~~
fma
I just tried English<->Mandarin with my wife...though not always grammatically
correct, it gets the point across.

For those who would use it while travelling abroad, keep it mind this requires
an Internet connection. In China, you would need VPN since Google services are
blocked.

~~~
shittyanalogy
You can download the language for offline usage, at least in android

~~~
chris_overseas
That only works for the (amazing) WordLens functionality. Live audio
translation still requires Google's cloud for processing.

~~~
agildehaus
WordLens works offline without any additional downloads, at least for the
languages I tried (Spanish, French, English).

Audio translation and TTS works offline if you have the proper languages
downloaded, but being able to detect what language is being spoken seems to be
an online-only feature.

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thehodge
Word Lens was the first iPhone app that I saw that really felt like Magic,
glad to see it was bought up and put infront of a mass audience (where I
assume it will gather data and learn)

~~~
oska
> (where I assume it will gather data and learn)

Yes, if you look in the settings the following option appears:

☑ Improve camera input (Allow Google to retain your images related to
translation)

It is set on by default.

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tonydiv
Congratulations to Otavio and the Word Lens team, I'm excited to see this in
the Google Translate app.

~~~
salimmadjd
Yeah, I noticed they finally pulled in Otavio's Word Lens into google
translate after they acquired him.

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covi
Really curious about the tech / arch. behind its ASR. Must have a lot of nodes
and tricks in place to support high throughput and low latency.

If I'm not mistaken, this paper [1] is the last time Google published about
the related architecture. We know very little about improvements over the last
7 years.

[1]
[http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090](http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D07-1090)

~~~
afsina
AFAIK there are several new advancements for both ASR and Translation front.
DBN and Special RNN called LSTM based systems surpassed classical approaches.
A recent Translation mechanism based on LSTM from Google:
[http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-
learni...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learning-
with-neural-networks.pdf)

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nanexcool
I speak English, Spanish and Italian. I've been talking to this app for the
past hour in those languages and translating to whatever languages have speech
output. This is so amazing.

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sibbl
Works pretty well, but so does Microsoft's Translation app for Windows Phone.
Having used Microsoft's app for 2 years now, I am really wondering what took
Google so long. Google's app offers coloring of the translation and a way more
languages. But in the end, it's as fast and reliable as Microsoft's solution
on my devices..

~~~
asyncwords
For those wondering, the app is called "Translator". I've also found the
translation to be pretty good, though it tends to trip when it comes to
handwriting.

[https://www.windowsphone.com/en-
us/store/app/translator/2cb7...](https://www.windowsphone.com/en-
us/store/app/translator/2cb7cda1-17d8-df11-a844-00237de2db9e)

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atian
The word lens is impressive. Tried it out on my university ID against some
bright light, and it was able to detect even the low-contrast regions. Even my
Mac keyboard. It works on almost anything.

It doesn't work on Chinese quite yet.

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ballpoint
It would be really cool if they could recognise the font (or a close match)
and display the translated words in almost the same style.

~~~
kornakiewicz
Cool, but pretty useless.

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nicklo
Google has published a lot of work recently about using deep learning for
language translation with really impressive results. Anyone know if Google
Translate is now neural net based? Or would a many-layered net not scale to
the amount of API calls that Google translate receives?

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nness
Having just spent a month travelling through Japan, I can attest to the
brilliance of the Translate app even before this update! That said, the
Android version seems more feature rich than the iOS version (maybe I just
don't know where to look for the features)

~~~
minthd
What are the differences between the versions ?

Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?

~~~
yohui
> _Also, is Google legally allowed to only release the app for android ?_

Are they "legally allowed"? Why wouldn't it be legal?

Ask the same question with regards to Apple and iOS, and the answer is
patently clear.

~~~
rancur
> Why wouldn't it be legal?

don't waste your brain capacity on stupid people

there are too many of them

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joezydeco
I'm just amazed this runs on my iPhone 4. Brilliant upgrade.

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datashovel
If they haven't already started doing this, it seems it would be inevitable,
to turn this into a full-fledged API for use in real-time communications, like
WebRTC apps, etc...

I see that they have an API, but not sure how feasible it would be to use in
real-time apps.

~~~
joshstrange
I work on software that, among other things, runs a call center and I've been
getting requests to do something like this in real time so that we can
communicate with our users that don't speak english (We have agents who speak
other languages but they wanted a fallback for when they weren't there). I
told them real-time was still a little bit out (even with this as an API it
would take time to integrate). This is really exciting though and I look
forward to the day that we can do this will little to no lag and talk to
people who don't share a language in common.

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ninguem2
English <-> Portuguese needs some work. I had an hilarious conversation with
myself.

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Aissen
Do we know the Word Lens (Quest Visual) acquisition price in the end ?

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anonymousDan
I wonder when they'll integrate it with google glass to allow e.g. realtime
subtitles for when people are talking to you in a foreign language.

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ronnier
This is Amazing. Very helpful here in Japan. I'll be glad when the word lens
feature supports Japanese.

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johansch
Before this they kept the Android app a lot more powerful. Are the iOS and
Android apps finally on par now?

~~~
bla2
I doubt that was an intentional strategy. Google seems to not push worse apps
to iOS in general. The new Maps UI launched on iOS first, for example.

~~~
finishingmove
Meanwhile on Windows Phone, we have YouTube blocked. Anyway, I have to admit
Google Translate is phenomenal now, even though it's thanks to the guys behind
Word Lens. Kudos to everyone involved. This is probably going to be one of my
most used apps from now on.

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dzhiurgis
So what languages are actually supported in conversation mode?

Few months ago spoken Thai input was not supported.

Also, World Lens works nothing like in the animation. The app scans for words
and provides translation in a traditional UI, it does not overlay translation
over the image.

~~~
ceejayoz
The Google Translate app (and Word Lens, I believe - it's been a few years
since I played with it) do use augmented reality to overlay directly on the
image.

~~~
dzhiurgis
Not on my phone. Shows square [align text] which does not disappear.

~~~
ceejayoz
Mine: [https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
xfa1/v/t1.0-9/17...](https://scontent-a-ord.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-
xfa1/v/t1.0-9/1782134_10100531027259617_6962033440903244379_n.jpg?oh=a2b3dd6a7f42a0e2667cc0142339ef01&oe=5533BD86)

~~~
dzhiurgis
It could be it behaves differently on older iPhone.

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dreen
Unfortunately crashes on my Nexus 5 when trying to take a picture :(

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okasaki
The photo translation doesn't work offline for me. I downloaded the languages
but when I take a photo it just says "no network". I can mark the text but
nothing happens.

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hngiszmo
Know what's funny? "This is fucking funny!"

(try it)

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tuananh
OCR is really fast and accurate. Impressive.

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m1117
It doesn't translate to indian english and to japanese english...

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0942v8653
As cool as the new features are, the app is now difficult and slow to use the
way I used to. Little things, like focusing the textbox when you tap clear,
are just _missing_. I'm willing to take that for the automatic OCR features,
but it's just worse for everything else (probably due to their new "Material
Design" strategy which doesn't belong on iOS).

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unholiness
Unfortunately, all of their text-recognition is still done on the cloud. So If
you're traveling, you most likely won't have a data plan in the country you're
visiting, and word lens won't work. This seems like a huge missing piece to
me.

It's strange because they let you download language packs so that all the
translation (and voice recognition) can be done locally. I have no knowledge
in this area, but honestly: is there something fundamental about text
recognition that it can't be done client-side?

~~~
teraflop
> is there something fundamental about text recognition that it can't be done
> client-side?

Since the blog post talks about how Google Translate now does client-side text
recognition, I suspect the answer to this question is "no".

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ape4
Poor news for Word Lens
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisua...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.questvisual.wordlens.demo&hl=en)

~~~
th0br0
Why poor news? Google bought Quest Visual (the company behind Word Lens) some
time ago.

~~~
magicalist
In fact, the blog post subheading for that section is _" Instant translation
with Word Lens"_

I'm curious if that part has improved with integration with Google's
Translate. The video-based translated word substitution was amazing, but my
understanding was that it was doing a very simple translation in the original
app, essentially a word at a time.

~~~
bobbles
Word-at-a-time use was perfect for me travelling around europe, as basically
all I wanted it for was translating signs

~~~
magicalist
Yeah, it works for most of the cases where you'd want to use something like
Word Lens. I was more just wondering how deep the new integration goes.

