Chinese social media giant Tencent is having a good year for apps – with lots of new releases and feature-filled updates – and now it has one more: QQ Hui Yan. It’s an augmented reality (AR), optical character recognition (OCR) translation app that uses your smartphone’s camera to read and translate words.
The in-built dictionary in the QQ Hui Yan app. Click image to enlarge.
That’s a lot of acronyms for one little app – but it’s a clever piece of kit. The OCR element recognizes words, and can give live translations (see the above picture). An in-built dictionary will then give you more context on the expression (pictured right).
This brand-new release already has iPhone and Android variants on its own QQ Labs page. The app is free, and requires no sign-up or sign-in to any QQ service. So far it supports translating English, French and German into Chinese, and vice versa.
It works when pointed at words on a piece of paper, or on a street sign or computer screen. It wasn’t even phased when I pointed it at the moving and pixelated words on the CNN evening news:
Tencent’s app devs are having a busy year, cranking out a desktop syncing app for Android phones, a very slick group messaging app called WeiXin, as well as a FaceTime-alike smartphone video-calling platform dubbed WeiShi.
Of course, there are other AR-OCR translation app options for Android, such as CamTranslator (with which I’m not very pleased), and the upcoming Pleco (which is now in private beta testing, and works fantastically). At the moment, I think Pleco is still more powerful and accurate – but it’s hard to argue with a major web firm giving you free stuff. Try out QQ Hui Yan at the Labs page link above.
[Hat-tip to TechRice for spotting this]
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