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Hi everyone. So, we're taking a look at one of Samsung's
cooler apps that they've released with this particular generation of Samsung phones.
The Galaxy S4 they've got a system called Optical Reader and the idea behind
Optical Reader is to work with printed text
in a slightly different way. Now it allows you to basically query a word
that you can see written down
and then pull up a dictionary for it as you can see and it will pull up things like
examples of what the word means, how it's pronounced and if you want to
you can even do translations so if I wanted to I could translate this text from one
language to another. So at the moment it's saying English to US, sorry English US to
English UK
bit of a strange one I know!
So instead let's translate it to French.
So let's find a word, let's have the word never, let's see if we can get that word.
There we go and you can see there it's translating the word never to jamais.
Now I can't actually speak French so I'll take its word for it but as an amazing piece of kit
the ability to kind of
focus on a word like this and have it translated, for people who travel this is
just incredibly powerful stuff.
It will also read QR codes so it will pull data and things like that in that manner and
also if you want to you can use it to actually take a capture mode picture
like that
and what it will then do is OCR all of the text and turn it into words.
Things that we can actually work with. If we now go like this,
select the text you want to be detected
and you can see there it's had a reasonable attempt
at converting that into text that we can read and obviously edit if we want to.
Send your share to somebody.
Now with any kind of OCR it all depends on how good a picture you manage to take, how
fuzzy it is.
Obviously trying to do it a bit like this is sometimes difficult.
The background colour that the text is sat on, the colour of the text, the size
of the text
the font of the text
there's an awful lot of things here that can go wrong and cause it to obviously make
mistakes.
Like blu tack it's put a slash in there instead.
By and large, when we were testing this outside in good light and with
some reasonably large text we found the translation to be really spot-on, better
than we expected anyway and certainly as good as you would get from a professional OCR
system.
All OCR is is fallible as it were and will make mistakes
and this one does a very good job.
When you combine it with the translation aspect Samsung have got a bit of a winner here.
It's a very very clever and neatly built piece of software.
As an application it works well
translating text from one language to another when you're out and about or in a foreign
country.
Wow! It's kind of breaking down those barriers that we used to have where, you know,
you go to a foreign country and you kind of feel a little bit like an outsider.
You can't read the signs, you're kind of wandering around looking like a tourist. Now,
you can have a bit more confidence that
you are reading the signs correctly and that's
a bar and not something else that you want to go into.
Absolutely fantastic and what a great little feature to have on a smartphone of all things.
Brilliant. So that is Optical Reader
from Samsung.