5 years of painfully repetitive, horribly out-dated and unbelievably unrealistic Spanish classes; useless. Thank you, Mr. Jobs. Now, if only you could strike a deal for an iPhone app that gives back wasted time.
On December 16th, the iPhone introduced its newest augmented-reality application, “Word Lens” to the app store. Word Lens is a ground-breaking real time language translator that allows its users to hold up their iPhones to any piece of unreadable text and have it translated for them right in front of their eyes. Now, us monolingual folks can kiss goodbye the days of looking like a tourist in an unknown city, or slipping, so gracefully, on a “piso mojado”.
The creators of the application, Quest Visual, insisted upon differentiating Word Lens from the somewhat similar Android Market application called “Google Goggles”. In doing this, Word Lens does not require that the user take a picture of the text before it is translated, and (as previously mentioned) puts extreme emphasis on the idea of “real time translation”. Apparently, this tactic has worked out quite well for Quest Visual as the application’s promotional video managed to generate 2.5 million views on YouTube in just under a week. Accompanying this popularity is income, as Word Lens has remained at the top of the list of best sellers on the iPhone app store since it was released.
If you’re the kind of person who has never seen a half-full glass of anything in your life, then I can assure you, Word Lens is not a perfect program. Well…yet. As of right now, the application is only able to translate text from Spanish to English (and vice versa). Also, there have been a number of complaints about the sensitivity of this app. For example, the user must keep their hands perfectly steady so Word Lens can read the text properly and be allowed the time to decode it. This means if your hands start shaking, you may need to restart the translating process.
Regardless of the early issues with the program, Quest Visual insists that this is merely “Word Lens 1.0”, and we should treat is as such. In the future, Quest Visual insists that Word View will be able to be used on smart phones other than the iPhone and it will be available in languages other than just Spanish and English.
Either way, it is hard to look over a ground-breaking application such as this without weighing the implications it may have on you and your business. Imagine a world where language was no longer a primary boundary between you and your customers. This could be the start of something big.
How do you think Quest Visual’s “Word Lens” will affect you and your business?