New, more powerful Google Translate app

[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.

[seszett]

It is really perfectible for French<->Mandarin at least.

You actually have to translate both sentences into English to understand how they somewhat mean the same thing when taken literally (but that's just the same problem as on translate.google.com)

[Someone1234]

Am I correct in assuming it requires a good fast internet connection to work at all? For example does it even work on 2G or is it WiFi only?

[kennyledet]

> The conversation feature is pretty phenomenal,

Yeah, it is. I had pretty much the same idea a few years back, and called it "SpaceChat". I ended up dropping the project because I was too busy with other things. Smh.

[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.

[NamTaf]

Precisely my thinking. I was wondering what'd happened to Word Lens and so to see them baked in to the Google engine is really exciting. Great work and congratulations!

[Igglyboo]

Totally agree. It's the first time in many years where I was genuinely surprised at the capabilities of a computer.

[ak217]

Congrats to Otavio and crew for bringing Word Lens all the way to such a spectacular success.

[AndrewKemendo]

Word Lens was the first iPhone app that I saw that really felt like Magic

When Augmented Reality works correctly, that's how it should feel.

[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.

[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

[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...

[choppaface]

The original word lens app was much closer to a hashmap of words in language src to dest.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15656331/real-time-image-...

[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.

[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...

[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.

[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.

[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?

[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 ?

[joezydeco]

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

[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.

[ex0r]

Some friends and I actually did something like this at a hackathon. We built a Google Hangouts app that used Google's translate API for real-time video conferencing in different languages.

[ninguem2]

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

[Aissen]

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

[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.

[ronnier]

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

[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.

[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.

[dreen]

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