Point, Shoot and Translate into English 159
edstromp points out this New York Times "story on using a pocket pc to translate a street sign. It requires at least a dialup connection as it sends the photo to a server for the majority of the processing: OCR, translation, English overlay for new image, and then transmission back to the user. All said and done, it takes about 15 seconds to translate a street sign. Put this with some augumented reality, and you have a rather useful tool."
What I'd like to see... (Score:3, Interesting)
Scientific American on Augmented Reality (Score:3, Interesting)
Lazy lazy! (Score:1, Interesting)
Ok, so what about China or Japan? If you are going for travel, you can learn a few Kanji. It's the least you could do. If you're going on business, as the article suggests, you should be a good little representative and be chosen because you know something about where you're going. Hopefully you know a lot, or at least enough to be able to order food from a menu.
It's kind of sad that no people won't even have to make the smallest step into being somewhere new of calling places by their real names. If you lovingly name your kid George, would you be upset if the Mexicans only refered to him with the pronunciation "hor-hey"?
Somewhat Related... (Score:3, Interesting)
Java (J2ME) is now in cell phones, I have one and have played around a bit. Biggest problem with real applications is lack of a good input device. Now, for speed dialing, my phone has "voice recognition", which is really a pattern match against a saved database of me saying each person's name. It is an i85 Nextel Phone.
Why not have a voice recognition processor? Now, the phone does not have enough horsies to crunch the stuff needed to do that...but: The phone has direct-connect. Why not a feature like direct connect, but instead of 2-way radioing another person, a voice processor system, which returns the processed speech as text into whatever is running on the phone? Take the time used out of alloted minutes...it's not like they have to connect anything in your call to the phone system to establish a call for you.
Data connection is only about 300 baud or so, but how much faster can you really talk (so that a computer can uderstand you) than 300 baud worth of text? Same thing for reading. I can't read my email while driving (at least not safely), but why not have a "my phone" (really a computer talking to my phone) read it to me? That solves the small screen display problem too.
Ok, enough crazy thinking for now, I could go on and on about this stuff.
-Pete
Re:Commoditize this thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't say that. We don't need to homogenize world culture for this thing to work. What gets homogenized is understanding of other cultures. Each person stays within the dialects and habits of his or her own culture, but sometimes learns a little bit about others.
Maybe if there had been something like this for America in the 50s and 60s, a Texas/Maine translator say, we wouldn't have ended up with our cultural homogeneity today. Though really, neither folks from Maine nor Texas have made many concessions to cultural homogenization.
The real evil of American cultural homogenization, such as it is, is the influence of big corporations. They'd benefit by commoditized cultural understanding, but individuals would benefit even more. So I don't see this as a call to arms for the Dark Side.