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.
If this thing can be made to do Chinese or Japanese... even if it does so haltingly, with mistakes...
Raise the price. For the love of god. Raise the price. This is much, much more valuable than five bucks. There have been times in life where I'd gladly have paid a dollar per minute for this. And I'm a cheapskate.
Raise the price. For the love of god. Raise the price.
Absolutely, read http://bit.ly/bdHKmm to understand why. (Sorry for the shortened URL, the URL recognition software here doesn't understand URLs with apostrophes in here, so it actually is necessary.)
Yes. No Android yet but this seems worth $10 to me. I'd do Chinese first. There's a big market for that in California; many Asian families have a language gap between grandparents or parents born abroad and a younger generation born here. Basic communication is easy but things slow down fast if conversation turns to anything complex. Being able to print some words neatly by hand in English and instantly get Cantonese would sell like crazy - I have 5 in-laws for whom it would be a no-brainer.
We have a lot more Vietnam refugees here than we do Chinese folks. If you'll notice, the three main languages you can get government papers in (at least over in San Jose, no experience elsewhere) is English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
San Jose is a pretty skewed example as it has a very high Vietnamese population, where over California there is probably an order of magnitude more Chinese immigrants.
Vietnamese would be easier to recognize/do a translation pack for too, now you mention it - basically the Latin alphabet with extra marks to make 30 letters. Apparently there are more north Vietnamese around here and Oakland, more South Vietnamese in SJ and down south, maybe 450k in all of CA. Chinese-American maybe 5-600k? More than 150k in SF.
Incidentally, there's other and easier untapped startup opportunities for the Asian language demographic, if anyone wants to send me a note via gmail
My in-laws are a mix so either language is good, both is better. I can promise 3 Android and 1 iPhone sale just in my home :)
The dictionary is free and the OCR is available as an in app purchase for $15.
I'm just saying this because it is not trivial to adapt an OCR engine to non-latin scripts, because the image analysis techniques are rather different.
As I was suffering from acute future shock last night I didn't make this clear... but I'd happily pay a premium for French, a much easier OCR problem (and, indeed, one of the easiest foreign languages for an English speaker to read, since there are so many loan words in both directions.)
I understand that Chinese is harder, for many reasons. It is also much harder for humans. But that is why I'd happily pay, say, $10 per day of my trip for an engine that gives reasonable hints. Maybe more. Try me and see.
Of course, once this technology is ubiquitous and the price of such a thing has fallen to nigh-zero it is going to change the world. But we have to walk before we run, and you'll need the money for R&D and legal costs.
If I was traveling to japan or china, I would gladly pay $50 per language to translate. That's probably too high for an in-app purchase but I think $29 would be a no-brainer for languages that don't use English characters.
Absolutely. I travel pretty much nonstop and I would pay dearly to be able to translate signs on arrival into a new country. Things like 'ATM' and 'Toilet' are crucial.
