Word Lens

Language barriers can be a pain when traveling overseas, and translation books aren’t really convenient to use. If you are overseas and find yourself confounded over an indecipherable language, consider the Word Lens app from Quest Visual.

The app is available on iOS, Android and Google Glass. Using augmented reality, users can point their phone’s camera at a foreign text and see the translated version on their screen. Word Lens deciphers and translates the words in real time using optical character recognition on frames of video. For data-conscious travelers, the best feature might be the fact that it does not require an Internet connection, making this the perfect translator for even the most remote destinations.

Word Lens isn’t perfect, and is capable of making translation mistakes. The app also has trouble with stylized text and handwriting. So far only Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Russian language packs are available, though more are expected to come out in the future.

Google recently acquired Quest Visual to incorporate Word Lens into their Google Translate service so the app and all available language packs are now free. To see the app in action, check out the video below.