Translate everything with your mobile phones camera!

Easier conversations and translation of texts with your mobile phones camera, with the new Google Translate!

 Google has released a major upgrade for the application of Google Translate for Android and iOS, which now turns your smartphone into a powerful translation tool.

 The first of the two new features of the new version is the better support of multilingual conversation with the user being asked to press the microphone function only once in the application, then "speak" to the application, and the application will recognize it and translates to one of the supported languages. The other party gets the text already translated in his own language, the application to recognizes it automatically, and translates it in near real time into text and reads it out at the same time.

 The second major upgrade of the application, is the feature of Word Lens, through which you can use the camera of your smartphone, take a picture of text or a sign, then the application translates it into one of the 36 supported languages .

 As mentioned by Google, the use of this function might be useful in your travels so that you can read for example Italian billboards in Milan, or choose what to eat in Barcelona. Indeed it can be translate in real time all you need to do is turn the camera of your mobile on a billboard or in a text, and you will see it translated on your screen, even if you have no internet connection. This function translates from English to French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish and vice versa and soon more languages will be added.

 Google's goal is to create a single translator via smartphone, a world "where the language is no longer an obstacle in finding information or contact with other cultures."

 Download it here: For Android/ For iOS 
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 Source: insidesearch
 

Meet Microsoft’s Cortana, a More Personal Siri

REDMOND, Wash. — When Microsoft was developing Cortana, a virtual assistant for its mobile operating system that was unveiled Wednesday, the company thought, naturally, about how it could improve on Siri, Apple’s sometimes bumbling assistant for the iPhone.

Its development teams studied other assistants too — actual human assistants, those keepers of executive calendars and intercepters of phone calls. After interviews with several of them, Microsoft resolved that virtual assistants need to do a better job of anticipating their bosses’ needs.

“Siri is this anthropomorphized character, but Siri doesn’t know you personally,” Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s operating system group, said in an interview.

Mr. Belfiore showed the results of its work on Wednesday at an event for software developers in San Francisco held by Microsoft. Cortana is the most high-profile feature of Windows Phone 8.1, a soon-to-be-released update to Microsoft’s mobile phone operating system.

It’s another way in which Microsoft is seeking to narrow the technological gap between its competitors and Windows Phone, which is a distant third among smartphone operating systems, accounting for 3 percent of worldwide shipments in the fourth quarter, according to IDC, the technology research firm.

Late last week in a conference room at the company’s headquarters, Mr. Belfiore demonstrated how Cortana offers all the Siri-like basics, with a number of its same shortcomings. Mobile phone users can use her to set calendar appoints with natural voice commands (“Schedule a phone call with Jim at 2 P.M. tomorrow.”)

Ask Cortana basic trivia — “How old is Barack Obama?” — and she responds with the correct answer in a congenial, synthesized female voice. But ask her when Barack Obama was elected president — a question with two correct answers — and she gets stumped, displaying a list of web search results on the topic so you can do the leg work yourself.

Mr. Belfiore showed how Cortana tries to go beyond Siri to figure out what mobile phone users want before they ask for it. If you keep searching for N.C.A.A. basketball scores, local traffic conditions and news on the Washington State mudslide, she will start to proactively display fresh data about those topics prominently.

With permission, Cortana can examine a user’s email to look for airline reservations, warning them if a flight is delayed. If traffic to the airport is horrendous on the day of departure, Cortana will notify users that they should get in their cars early. When you land in Mexico, Cortana, without prompting, will display the local currency exchange rate, provide an airport map and offer a link to an English-Spanish translation app.

Cortana is named after a virtual character in Halo, Microsoft’s science-fiction video game series, that uses her encyclopedic knowledge about the universe to help the game’s protagonist, Master Chief. The actress, Jen Taylor, who does the voice for the character, also provided recordings for the phone assistant’s voice.

Only when Microsoft’s new software is in use by the masses will it become clear whether it has a real edge on Siri. Apple’s virtual assistant was ridiculed, especially during its early days, for performance problems that rendered it unavailable when people wanted to use it. Those early impressions have been hard for Siri to shake, even as Apple has improved its technology.

Microsoft appears to be making Cortana more open to independent app developers than Apple has with Siri. People will be able to use voice commands to watch a television show on Hulu and to compose and send tweets.

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source:Bits