Google wouldn’t miss the opportunity to showcase something cool and new at MWC 2010, so they did, thanks to Eric Schmidt and his Google Goggles presentation. He demoed the translation feature of the service prototype in the video below:
As you can see, the handset takes a picture of a German food menu and then translates it into English (you can even check out the whole video transcription the device performed, on its official website). It all works fast and flawlessly, thanks to an optical character recognition engine, connected to the phone’s camera. It recognizes the image as text and this is translated to English afterwards by Google Translate.
Too bad that for now the service only works in the case of German to English translation, but the final version will have at least 52 languages available, as does Google Translate. In the future, your handset will also be able to translate signs, posters and whatnot.
[via googletranslate]
