The most impressive piece of technology you have seen this week

[andrewducker]

"Galavant Trailer ABC" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

This month. Possibly this year.

[andrewducker]

I shoulda done a poll :->

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

How on earth does it do OCR that quickly?

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

It's working with small amounts of distinct text, that's in fonts that are designed to be read quickly and clearly. Signage is a very good constrained domain for this type of problem.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

An interesting spin on what tools like Google Goggles have been doing for some time.

[andrewducker]

Does Google Goggles do translation? I've had it recognise objects, and I know that OCR is now a lot faster, but I didn't realise it was now doing that.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

Yes, they've linked to Translate for a while now. Which gives you a lot more options, language-wise and for free...

[andrewducker]

Oh, cool. I must download it again and give it a go.

Did you get my comment about your Twitter posts?

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

That is insanely awesome.

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

Oh my.

I wonder what 'reverse words' and 'erase words' do...

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I think Google Human Body is slightly better, but not by much!

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Seems pretty obvious: They're marked as "demo", and show that the machine can recognise words and do stuff with the words without affecting the rest of the picture.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Holy shit

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

The main difference between this an previous attempts is one doesn't have to select or highlight the area with the text... it recognises what is text. There's been a few 'user tests' which aren't as accurate as the above vid, with the usual 'babelfish' amusement, but this is still OMG TEH FUTURE IZ NOW!

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I'd never expect this kind of thing to be perfect. Heck, people aren't perfect. But the fact that we can do it at all blows me away.

Next up, building it into my glasses.

And then my eyes.

And then my brain.

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

This combined with the voice translaters is going to make my next trip to a foreign language country really fun.

[karohemd.livejournal.com]

Nifty but it's still limited by the machine translation parser. Should be good enough to get the gist of signage, though.
Does it recognise proper names (one of the major pitfalls in machine translation)?

I'll be really impressed if they bring out a version that can do double-byte character languages.

[tempestteapot.livejournal.com]

Now that is cool!

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

This is without question not only the most impressive bit of technology I've seen this year, it's done more than anything else to convince me that perhaps I do want an iphone. That is fucking *useful*, as well as amazing.