Today Google is introducing a new feature of Google Goggles that will prove useful to travelers Goggles translation.
Here’s how it works:
- Point your phone at a word or phrase. Use the region of interest button to draw a box around specific words
- Press the shutter button
- If Goggles recognizes the text, it will give you the option to translate
- Press the translate button to select the source and destination languages.
Google Translate works by connecting the phone’s camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) engine on a server which recognizes the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.
The first Goggles translation prototype was unveiled earlier this year at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and could only recognize German text. Today Goggles can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and can translate to many more languages. Google’s goal is to eventually be able to to read all of the Latin languages and non-Latin languages (such as Chinese, Hindi and Arabic) as well.
Google Goggles v1.1 is available on devices running Android 1.6 and higher. To download, you can go to the Android Market app on your phone and search for “Google Goggles”.
