Google Uses Word Lens for Instant Translation

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 15 Jan 2015

Open the Google Translate app, point your phone’s camera towards a street sign, and view the sign’s translation on your phone’s screen. This sort of functionality is offered by Google and it’s all thanks to Word Lens technology.

Quest Visual’s Word Lens is an augmented reality translation app that uses the smartphone’s camera to scan foreign text, translate foreign text, and display the translation on the smartphone’s screen. Google acquired Quest Visual in May 2014 and implemented Word Lens functionality into its Google Translate app.

Google recently announced that it updated its Google Translate app for iOS and Android. One of the cool new features the update introduces is instant translation with Word Lens.

Here’s how things work without Word Lens: launch the Google Translate app -> take a photo of some text -> let the app use OCR to detect and translate the text -> check out the translation. Please note that this sort of functionality works with 36 languages. You can translate text to and from 36 languages.

And here’s how thing work with Word Lens: launch the Google Translate app -> point the camera at some text -> let the app detect and translate the text -> check out the translation on your phone’s screen. Please note that this sort of functionality only works with a handful of languages: English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. Support for more languages will be added in the future.

The updated Google Translate app for iOS and Android comes with another interesting change: it enhances real-time conversation mode, feature that has been available on Android since 2013. As Google explained, the conversation can flow faster and more naturally now.

The video embedded below shows how you can have a more fluid conversation with the updated Google Translate app. Just tap the mic to start speaking in a language, tap the mic again to have the app detect the second language, and enjoy a fluid conversation.



  • Get Google Translate for iOS from the App Store.
  • Get Google Translate for Android from Google Play.
Learn more about Google Translate here.



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