As it’s a Google app the text recognition engine is most likely being constantly updated (captured images are sent to Google for processing) which means it’ll keep getting better. Even if you’ve already invested in Hanping Chinese Camera or Pleco OCR then it’s still worth having around. ![]() Regardless of any lacking features, there’s no arguing that for free this is a great tool. Text recognition is also only available for horizontally aligned text, ruling out the use of this tool for a large portion of Chinese language books. Of course you could just capture it again, but that’s hardly ideal if you want the Pinyin for more than a few words. After you move from OCR mode to the dictionary, there’s no way to get back to your already captured image and it’s lost forever. ![]() The flaws for using this as a serious study tool become apparent almost immediately, most notably that the phonetics for the currently selected word aren’t displayed anywhere except the full dictionary entry which requires clicking out of OCR mode. Press the arrow to the right of the translated word to view a more detailed definition along with the Pinyin. To translate a word use your finger to highlight it, if it’s recognised then the translation will be displayed above the camera window. The photo will be captured and after a few moments characters should become grouped together into words by a light grey background. Position the camera over some Chinese text then press the camera button at the bottom. It’s not necessary to select the source language as this will be auto-detected, but if you’ll also be typing during your translating session then it couldn’t hurt. ![]() The bottom half of the screen will turn into a camera window. To access the OCR functionality in Google Translate first launch the app, then select the target language at the top right of the screen followed by pressing the camera button located at the bottom right. If you’re learning Chinese then you’ve most likely already heard of Hanping Chinese Camera and Pleco OCR, both provide very good text recognition implementations, but how does this free offering from Google stack up? In addition to straight-up translations it also includes a conversation mode, handwriting recognition, voice dictation, and most recently character recognition, or OCR. The Google Translate Android app has been gradually getting better and better.
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