Babelshot 1.3 for iOS - Translate Printed Text Simply by Taking a Photo

Redmond, WA    Jun 18, 2012

[prMac.com] Redmond, Washington - Codium Labs today announces Babelshot 1.3 for iOS, a major update to their travel app that allows users to take a photo of printed text in any of 36 languages and quickly get a translation into any of the 47 other languages. Featuring offline optical character recognition, the app employs the Google Translate web service in its back end. The upgrade includes support for non-Latin character sets, such as Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and Korean, and very high accuracy OCR, achieved by support for improved, high-resolution cameras and faster processors in iOS devices.

When introduced in 2009, Babelshot 1.0 was the first app of its kind, and the first app ever implementing OCR on any mobile platform. Since that time, the app has steadily evolved, and now with improved hardware comes a major upgrade to the app that provides a significant jump in performance.

Optical character recognition is a daunting challenge, even under the best of conditions, as with 300 dpi scanned text and a personal computer. Now with Babelshot, users can expect comparable results by virtue of 5 megapixel, built-in cameras, and dual core processors. The app's text recognition function relies on Tesseract OCR, highly regarded software originally developed by HP, coupled with a custom image-processing engine.

Feature Highlights:
* Take a picture of printed text and get a translation moments later
* Achieve high quality translations using advanced software, high-speed processors, and high-resolution cameras
* Very high accuracy Optical Character Recognition via the built-in Tesseract OCR software
* Manually input text using the virtual keyboard or an external keyboard
* Translate text using the camera or manual input, and then save it to the app's built-in Archive

Unlike other apps of its kind, Babelshot does text recognition on the device itself, never needing to send photos over a cellular network, saving expensive user bandwidth while abroad. Also, it translates text in sentences, not individual words, producing translations that are more natural and coherent. Ideal for automatically translating menus, booklets, product manuals, or foreign newspapers without any typing, the upgraded Babelshot 1.3 is a must-have app for anyone who does translation of text on an iDevice. Babelshot was the top pick by O'Reilly Media as Best App for Translating Printed Text (Nov 13, 2009).

"The kind of AI required for OCR is computationally intensive, and this updated version of Babelshot is much faster, optimized for the new dual-core processors," commented Olga Shynkevich of Codium Labs. "In addition, the app can now achieve greater accuracy by analyzing high resolution images with more than a million pixels."

Device Requirements:
* iOS device with autofocus and high-resolution camera
* Compatible with iPhone 3GS/4/4S, and the New iPad
* Requires iOS 3.0 or later
* Internet connection required for the translation function
* 27.3 MB

Language Support: * U.S. English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese

Pricing and Availability: Babelshot - Photo Translator 1.3 for iOS is on sale now at $2.99 (USD) for one week only and will return to the normal price of $4.99 thereafter. The app is available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Travel category. Review copies are available on request.

Babelshot 1.3
Purchase and Download
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Based in Redmond, Washington, Codium Labs, LLC was co-founded by Olga Shynkevich in 2009. The 2-person startup company specializes in iOS apps. Their other popular product is Offline Pages, an app that employs AI techniques to save individual pages and entire websites to iOS devices for browsing offline. Copyright (C) 2009-2012 Codium Labs, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, iPhone, and iPod are registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. Other trademarks and registered trademarks may be the property of their respective owners.
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Olga Shynkevich
Co-Founder
United States

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