New Google application to translate street signs, posters and other text while on the go

02/19/2010 16:38

Google has unveiled a prototype of a real-time optical character recognition system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that complements the Goggles Android application capable of copying business cards directly into the address book and provide augmented reality overlays for restaurants.

Google's Hartmut Neven sees a great potential in the Goggles application and shares his vision with the world in the Google Translate Blog:

"Soon your phone will be able to translate signs, posters and other foreign text instantly into your language. Eventually, we're hoping to build a version of Google Goggles that can translate between all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate — bringing even more information to you on the go."

Here's what's happening on the video:

The prototype connects the Android's camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine, recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate. Currently, this technology only works for German-to-English translations and it's in its Beta testing phase yet.

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