App of the Day: Word Lens for iPhone

Word Lens , an app that translate English textual matter to and from Spanish on the fly , is a reminder of just how hefty apps can be . But how ’s it really work ? It ai n’t utter , but it ’s still pretty bloody awe-inspiring .

I pointed Word Lens at all the Spanish I could find — the taco hand truck down the street , a Spanish - language newspaper , some signs on Google Street View and Google images — and I have to say that I was pretty amazed by how well it perform . sure enough , sometimes words jump around like shapeshifters on chap , interpret and retranslating apace as you wiggle the camera . And of course of study the translations are just done parole by word , resulting in broken condemnation that rarely have any semblance of right sentence structure . But if you occur into it with your expectations in check , Word Lens is still a terrific feat in wandering computation , even if its futurist WOW quotient is , for now , a fleck greater than its real earth utility .

The app , which was released this morning by a company called QuestVisual , was two and half years in the making , accord to founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese . Good admitted to TechCrunch that the “ translation is n’t perfect , but it gets the point across , ” and suppose that French , Italian , and Portuguese were probable candidates for future updates . But even without bonk what update dwell forward for Word Lens , it ’s already an undeniably exciting taste of the future , one of the rare apps that transforms our smartphones into something entirely Modern . [ Word Lens ]