{"id":248,"date":"2008-04-05T13:13:56","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T13:13:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=248"},"modified":"2008-04-05T13:13:56","modified_gmt":"2008-04-05T13:13:56","slug":"mobile-translation-an-unfinished-hack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=248","title":{"rendered":"Mobile translation &#8211; an unfinished hack!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Fourth of the <a href=\"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=243\">random ideas for Over The Air<\/a> hacks &#8211; a mobile service that lets you translate foreign text that you come across from your mobile phone. <\/p>\n<p>The plan was to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>reuse some <a href=\"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=200\">old code from last year<\/a> to control my cameraphone and take a picture\n<\/li>\n<li>upload the image to <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/leadtools.net\/\">LeadTools<\/a>, using their <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Optical_character_recognition\">OCR<\/a> web service to get the text back from the picture\n<\/li>\n<li>translate the text into English using the <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/apis\/ajaxlanguage\/\" target=\"_blank\">Google translate API<\/a> web service\n<\/li>\n<li>display the English text on the phone screen\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unfortunately, too much time spent drinking beer, listening to talks, and generally slacking, meant that I didn&#8217;t finish this one.<\/p>\n<p>But I thought it still might be interesting to share my experiences with the LeadTools service.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->Here are a couple of examples to show the sort of responses I was able to get from the web service.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/img233.imageshack.us\/my.php?image=image034ww9.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" src=\"http:\/\/img233.imageshack.us\/img233\/7438\/image034ww9.th.jpg\" border=\"0\"\/><\/a>It doesn&#8217;t like my handwriting. No matter how clear I tried to make my childish scrawl, it was unable to recognise any letters (let alone words!).<\/p>\n<p>It managed to turn this into:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: black; font-style: bold; border: thin grey solid; background-color: #e0e0e0\"><p>w<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Hmmm&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/img233.imageshack.us\/my.php?image=image035wv6.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" align=\"left\" hspace=\"10\" vspace=\"10\" src=\"http:\/\/img233.imageshack.us\/img233\/7792\/image035wv6.th.jpg\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a>It is better &#8211; but still a little flakey &#8211; with printed text.<\/p>\n<p>It managed to turn this into:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: black; font-style: bold; border: thin grey solid; background-color: #e0e0e0\"><p>-a<\/p>\n<p>betav?:rie<br \/>\nplay? dev&#038;op ? interact<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fourth of the random ideas for Over The Air hacks &#8211; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[158,46,156,146,157,159,19,43],"class_list":["post-248","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-google","tag-mobile","tag-ocr","tag-overtheair","tag-translate","tag-translation","tag-windows-mobile","tag-windowsmobile"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}