We just received a press release from speech-processing specialist Loquendo to draw our attention to an iPhone application from PONS GmbH, a Stuttgart-based publisher of translation software and dictionaries. Called SnapTranslate, it enables iPhone users to take a picture of words in a menu, road sign, magazine, newspaper or other item of interest; then they can see translated versions of selected text. By clicking on a speaker icon, the new text can be read aloud, using “expressive TTS” from Loquendo (hence the press release from the R&D subsidiary of Telecom Italia.

Here’s a video presentation of SnapTranslate. I downloaded a free version form the AppStore in iTunes and it supports a pairing of Spanish-to-English and vice versa. PONS publishes over 500 dictionaries and language courses. The premium version of SnapTranslate, thanks to TTS (text-to-speech) software from Loquendo supports spoken output in German, English, French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian or Polish.

Thanks to image capture and optical character recognition software from Potsdam-based Beyo GmbH, the app is able to overcome any “blur” that may usually occur with unsteady handling of iPhones. It is also able to recognize and support translation of languages that use Cyrillic alphabets or other non-Romance languages as they are added.

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Tags: Mobile Speech Apps, Text-to-Speech, Machine Translation, Loquendo