Google demonstrates image-to-text translation at mobile tech fair

Internet giant Google has successfully demonstrated the prototype version of a new image recognition technology that can capture an image file into a cell phone and translate a non-English text into English text.

This is what Andrew Gomez, an associate product-marketing manager at Google, posted on Google blog this week.

"Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't understand, a waiter impatiently tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no idea whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, eventually you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language.

Of course, that's not possible today - but yesterday at the Mobile World Congress we demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in an extremely early stage, but we thought we'd share this demo with you because it shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to our translation technologies."

This week, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the chairman and CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt and the company's scientist Hartmut Neven demonstrated a prototype version of Google Goggles  recognition software merging with Google's machine translation technologies.
Schmidt took a picture of a German menu on a cell phone, which instantly translated the written German text into English.

Neven said in the company blogpost that this prototype connects the phone's camera to an optical character recognition  (OCR) engine, recognises the image as text and then translates that text into English with Google Translate.

He said that currently this technology only works for German-to-English translations and is not yet ready for prime time.

Google plans to eventually bring out Googles Googles that can translate all of the 52 languages currently supported by Google Translate.