Wow. Just Wow.

I had to put the App to test.

Printed some simple English words and tried it out.

Original paper:

http://imgur.com/EYsko

What the App shows in REALTIME:

http://imgur.com/FhaSW

Comparison with Google Translate:

http://imgur.com/GOd94.jpg

[EDIT: Note, Translating Muerto Fin to English in Google Translate, does result in 'Dead End'. Can any Spanish reader clarify why the original Google Translate chose to translate 'DEAD END' to 'callejón sin sali'.]

[EDIT: So let me get this straight. Their program, running on iPhone [256MB RAM, 600 MHz ARM CPU], can take a live image, perform OCR, translate, create another image with the translated words. And all of this happens real time? Wow.]

I think it's really hard to get a 'Wow' reaction from HN crowd. And you have hit a home run! As someone else said in this thread, you are going to make boatload of money. Congrats!

Whoever created this deserves the boatload of money they are going to make. It has the potential of radically change the experience abroad for people traveling in foreign countries.

yep, this is a word-for-word translation, because it's fast and it gets the point across. we're working to improve translation quality and finesse, but it's a much harder problem to understand grammar. so, we hope it gives the general meaning, and you can learn to piece it apart.

(hola, i'm john deweese, one of the creators) good to hear the early positive response, and we look forward to your insightful feedback (support@questvisual.com) -- mention this site so we pay some extra attention.

i hope this app will be nice and disruptive, and we'll be looking carefully at what people expect and how they actually use it. it's a platform, and we're really excited about the directions it opens up.

thanks for the link, cheers!

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."