Baidu, the company best known for making China’s top Internet search engine, just made its translation app available for iOS. The descriptions for the iPhone and Android versions are in Chinese (search for “Baidu Translate” in the stores), as are its intro/instruction screens, but don’t worry–the app’s user interface is mostly in English.
One of Baidu Translate’s key features is voice translation for English, Mandarin and Cantonese, which I found to be very accurate. But that’s not the cool part. I am having the most fun with Baidu Translate’s image recognition feature, which lets you take a picture of something and circle it. The app then attempts to identify the object and tell you what it is in Chinese and English.
The image translator’s accuracy is currently hit-and-miss, with often hilarious mistakes. It correctly identified a picture of my kitten (though it called her a Norwegian Forest Cat, when she is actually a Taiwanese Alley Cat), an Xbox 360 controller (but not by brand–Baidu Translate just described it in English as a “wireless handle”), a tin wind-up toy, a mug, a pen, and a chair. But the app thought my Homer Simpson Pez dispenser was a “cartoon duck” (to be fair, he does look like a yellow rubber ducky) and it described an image of Harry Potter as a “braised carp head.”
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