Sam Oliver
Shortly after the iOS translation app "Word Lens" was featured in a prominent iPhone commercial from Apple, the developer behind the app has been snapped up by rival Google.
Quest Visual, the startup responsible for Word Lens translator available for iOS as well as Android and Google Glass, is now owned by Google, the developer announced on its website. There it revealed that Google plans to integrate Word Lens functionality into its own translation services.
Quest Visual said the change will allow its technology to provide "broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future."
Following news of the acquisition, the developer has made both the Word Lens app and all of its language packs available free for a limited time.
Word Lens was featured prominently in Apple's "Powerful" ad for the iPhone 5s that debuted last month. In the commercial, a man on a motorcycle translates a road sign that reads "estrada desmoronado" in Galician to discover it says "road collapsed" in English.
The Word Lens app is unique in that it takes a live camera feed from the iPhone and replaces the foreign text in real time to allow the user to read the words as they were intended.
Malcolm Owen
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122 Comments
"The Word Lens app is unique in that it takes a live camera feed from the iPhone and replaces the foreign text in real time to allow the user to read the words as they were intended." As they were "intended?" I'm fairly sure the words were intended to be written in their native language. :) (A better way to put this might be to say that it replaces the foreign text in real time to allow the user to "understand" the words as they were intended.)
Was going to download this.
Not now.
Good-bye word lens. Don't you love how Google buys up everything cool?
I don't want Apple to buy up companies just to protect them, but it seems like the only way to prevent Google or Facebook or some other company from snatching them up.
I just pisses me off that cool tech companies doing neat stuff end up being owned by Companies whose products and services I don't want to touch with a ten-foot pole. I mean now what? I'll never get to use Nest, or WordLense, or Occulus Rift. Like, F-off big goliathes that I hate.
I just wish support for asian languages was made before they got bought out%u2026 would have really loved to have had support for Korean, Chinese and Japanese. Sigh, oh well.
And here I was thinking about downloading this app, now that Google got it's ugly paws on it, no way. Shame, was looking like a useful app to have.