Quest Visual, The Minds Behind Word Lens, Has Been Picked Up By Google, All Launguage Packs Free

I remember when Word Lens was first starting out and how amazingly brilliant I thought it was at the time. After a quick search in our history I found that it was clear back in January of 2011 when the app was first demoed. It didn’t make its way to Android until July of 2012. Seem like ages ago. In case you are lost, Word lens is an augmented reality app that take text viewed on your screen through your devices camera and translates it to and from different languages visually without user input. The app has done quite well for itself over the years with a number of updates, additions of languages and UI tweaks. It would seem that they have finally caught the attention of Google and the developer company behind the app, Quest Visual, has been scooped up.

A statement that was discovered on the company’s website by AndroidPolice is as follows:

 

With Word Lens, we’ve seen the beginnings of what’s possible when we harness the power of mobile devices to “see the world in your language.”

By joining Google, we can incorporate Quest Visual’s technology into Google Translate’s broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future.

As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we’ve made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time while we transition to Google.

We’re looking forward to continuing our work at Google – stay tuned!

Sounds pretty good to me. I mean, why spend the time and money to develop a similar application when you can just buy people that have already done it? What does this mean though? Well, for now if you download the app you get all the language packs for free. The packs, if memory serves, were $4.99 each in the past. So it is a huge savings. While many of us might not need them all, you will have them. The statement clearly indicates that at some point in time their work will make its way into Google Translate. Google Translate has already gone under a ton of work and offers camera translations, but not real time live translations like Word Lens. Near as I can tell, I haven’t used Google Translate in a while, the visual side requires relaying information to Google thus needing a data connection where as Word lens is offline.

It all seems like it could be a win win for Google, Word Lens and consumers who need both online and offline translations in a variety of formats in one simple app. For now though, you can grab the Word Lens app along with the suite of languages for completely free. never hurts to have it around and, really, why not?