Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by zavi | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

zavi·

It works offline.

View on HN

Google put it's translation engine into the client? I doubt that.

Yeah it looks like they did:

• Word Lens: Just point your camera to a sign or text and the Translate app will instantly translate the text, even without Internet/data connection. Currently available in: English ↔ French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.

(From https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... )

That's amazing. Major kudos to the Google Translate team if it really does work fully offline.

The live video translation was a startup that they acquired ("Word Lens"). It already worked offline so it would be strange if they had removed that feature.

I doubt this implies that the Google translation engine has been ported to work offline.

It does and has for some time[1]. Just switch to airplane mode and try it before asserting this? You have to download the language packs first, but it works.

[1] http://googletranslate.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-worlds-langu...

Does anyone know of any equivalent open source systems for the word lens or audio translate apps? Or even what kind of algs they are using?

The translation quality won't be (anywhere near) as good offline as online, but it works well enough for word lens to be useful without a data connection!

They've been able to do offline voice-to-text, for English at least, for the last 1-2 years, so it's possible. But I would tend to agree...seems doubtful that they could have best-in-class real-time translations....offline, right?

and yet that never works for me. the offline bit

The "Google Translate" app has supported offline translation for "pinned" languages for a while now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com