Scanning and translating a photo in Google Translate On AndroidĪs described earlier, the ability to scan and translate a photo through Google Translate is only available on mobile devices. It saves much time and effort that would otherwise go into tedious work. Typical applications include indexing printed documents, automating data entry, archiving information, and synchronous translation. OCR can be augmented with AI to understand the text better than other programs for advanced methods. You can use it to scan text in the physical world, transforming it into a digital format. Google Translate is just a perfect example of such a system. You will often see OCR implemented on systems with a balanced combination of hardware and software. However, this tool’s visual data processing is on another level. Any platform with OCR can convert digital photos into computer-readable code. The underlying technology recognizes text from images and then converts it into an editable format. You might have noticed this term when converting a PDF document into Word or another rich text format.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. The following article will look at how you can scan and translate a photo in Google Translate apps on Android and iOS devices. Once that text has been identified, it becomes a matter of seconds for the existing software infrastructure to translate it to any other language.

Simply put, it enables your device or a regular camera to identify and recognize text within pictures. We are going to learn more about what this tool is in the following section. The technology that allows Google Translate to scan and translate in real-time through your device’s camera is the OCR text tool. Those renditions only support translating short-span text, limited documents, and web pages. You cannot use the same technology on a desktop or through Chrome.

The feature for scanning and translating a photo has only been integrated into the Google Translate app on Android and iOS.

Google translate photo to text