Fourth of the random ideas for Over The Air hacks – a mobile service that lets you translate foreign text that you come across from your mobile phone.
The plan was to:
- reuse some old code from last year to control my cameraphone and take a picture
- upload the image to LeadTools, using their OCR web service to get the text back from the picture
- translate the text into English using the Google translate API web service
- display the English text on the phone screen
Unfortunately, too much time spent drinking beer, listening to talks, and generally slacking, meant that I didn’t finish this one.
But I thought it still might be interesting to share my experiences with the LeadTools service.