Google Translate for Android Now Translates Word Images to Text

Google has brought in optical character recognition (OCR), a feature that helps translate images of words, to its update Google Translate for Android applicaiton. The Android version of Google's language translation service has translated several languages worldwide for some time now. The new Google Translate app for its mobile operating system, however, includes the ability to translate text from images. The search giant said that the updated Google Translate taps on the power of OCR from its Google Goggles service to break down images and translate them to text. "This makes Google Translate for Android one of our most intelligent and machine learning-intensive apps. Speech recognition, handwriting recognition, OCR, and machine translation all rely on powerful statistical models built on billions of samples of data," said Etienne Deguine, associate product manager for Google Translate.