Google has rolled out another update to its Translate app for Android, adding Google Goggle’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. The update will now enables Translate users to translate text using a device’s camera lens. Earlier, users had to manually type out, hand write or say it aloud to get the translation. Now all you need to do is click!
To use the Google Translate’s new feature, users need to press the camera button, placed at the bottom right of the display. Point at the text and tap to freeze. Then brush with your finger over the particular text you want to translate. Translated text pops onto the screen. Users will still be able to use the text to speech option.
The app currently supports character recognition for languages namely Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. Google will be adding some more languages to the list in the near future.
“This makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps. Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, and machine translation all rely on powerful statistical models built on billions of samples of data,” says Google in a blog post.
Google Translate app for Android is available for free in the Google Play store. To download, click here.
