Japan Goggles App Reviews

Often the live camera doesnt find the correct kanji. Could be better.

If you can add sentence covertion that is great

Very nice ..free and usable application. I t recognize well ..

Easy to use.

Kudos to those who have gotten this to work. I live non-stop year-round in Japan. I would appreciate a tool such as this. Unfortunately, this app has never worked. I use OCR apps and code reader apps without a problem. These apps get you ready for using a finnicky camera-recognition app. However, no matter how careful I am with the live camera or using images from the Camera Roll (album), this app simply churns out garbage. The kanji arent even in the ballpark. iPhone 4S fully updated

Cant read even simple kanji, disappointing. Good idea but poor execution.

After lots of testing I know one thing: it cant translate even a single word...

Dont buy. This is fake. Bought it when I was in tokyo. Recognizes nothing on my iphone4. Tried tens of times, no one successfull. How to get back my money? Had written claim, no response. Cheaters?

You can only read one character at a time, and it has about a 5% chance of making a match. The still camera function is broken, too.

どうもありがとうございました！！ Works wonderfully for homework texts.

This app sounded great and I had high hopes for it. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get it to translate a single word or phrase. I tried translating a few characters from the Yomiuri Shimbun in good light, with good contrast, and no unnecessary characters in the crop zone. The live camera setting didnt work with the 2.0 default refresh rate, 1.0, 0.5, or none (manual). I also tried taking a still picture but the application guessed wildly for even simple kanji (I started with phrases I didnt know but moved on to characters I did know to confirm performance). I also tried reading titles and phrases from a photocopy issued by our main office: No luck. Helping me quickly translate Japanese documents sent by the office was one of the reasons I bought this app, but it wasnt up to the task. This application would be both useful and cool if it actually worked, but from my experience, its just not there yet. Hopefully a future update will correct these problems or I just threw away $4.99.

This app is a lifesaver for a Japanese learner! Its great because has that sill photo mode where you can bring album photo for characters recognition. A+

After reading the very mixed customer reviews, I bought this app hoping for the best and expecting the worst. In the end, I was pleasantly surprised and consider it $5 well spent. Is it perfect? Not by a long shot - but it is definitely a helpful tool for anyone living in Japan or studying Japanese. If youre looking for an end-all solution, this is not it - but for a basic translation program, to help you easily translate multi-character words or short phrases, it works quite well. The good: works as advertised and performs reasonably well; much more affordable than some other translation programs; good integration of Google translate; quick character recognition (in most cases); allows you to select similar characters if the one IDed isnt correct. The bad: has trouble with bold-type and irregular fonts; has frequent trouble recognizing certain hirigana (especially "ni" に and "ri" り); computer screen recognition is still a bit lacking; only can recognize up to 12 characters at a time. The ugly (or things to improve): need a way to combine characters that arent correctly recognized (e.g. "ni" keeps appearing as ( + こ [L parenthesis + "ko"] - and there is no way to combine the two characters to recognize the correct one); on a related note, more input options or search options for incorrect characters would be nice; and finally, to read verticle text you must turn the phone to the right - but (as someone who typically flips to phone to the left when using portrait mode) this can be a bit counter-intuitive - the option to rotate right OR left would be nice. With these improvements, my 4-star rating would definitely be upgraded to 5-stars. Also, I should note that while the camera on the iPhone 4 allows for recognition of fairly small type, the cameras on the iPod (4th gen) and older iPhones dont have enough resolution for fine print (e.g. news papers, business documents), but are still able to use the app for recognizing larger print and/or signs. In closing - this app does need additional refinement, but is a useful and convenient tool for simple translations of short phrases. Lets be honest - 10 years ago, this type of thing was pretty much considered sci-fi, so we have to be realistic in our expectations of what it can do. With that in mind, it works remarkably well, and the developer continues to improve and refine the functionality - so things should only get better. I look forward to seeing what improvements the future brings.

app failed to recognize japanese characters as common as that for "big," in black lettering on white background with working iphone camera. said "no characters found for this suggestion" for hundreds of common characters. finally got it to suggest a match (using the less convenient still photo mode), for the kanji 英語 ("english"). it suggested "turnip." maker lucsens pretty much ignored request for a refund of this useless product. great idea for an app, though. would love to buy a working version.

Ive had this app for two weeks. It works on no Japanese characters. Giving you a "match" that looks nothing like what you entered. I tried single characters and still the same results. Im Deleting this app today.

Ive played with this app for an hour now and have only been able to translate one word correctly according to my Japanese wife. I cannot believe they would release this app with such a poor success ratio. Great idea and thats about it. Complete waste of money in my opinion.

This app is terrible. It cant recognize simple kanji. Forget on signs it cant even do kanji printed on white paper. Even worse it confuses HIRAGANA for kanji, you cant get much worse than that. Save you money, get Pleco and copy paste to you favorite Japanese dictionary. Its annoying but at least it works...

Even after the recent update, this app doesnt work. Great idea, too bad it does nothing. Save your money. I would like a refund.

Its a much-needed app and a great idea, and it has gotten more usable. If you can finagle it to recognize the characters, its a bit hard to work with and does not display furigana, which would be very helpful, but it can do what it is supposed to do. It is awkward (though possible!) to recognize vertical text. With some more work this could be a truly great app. Looking forward to future versions.

Live camera consistently crashes on iPod 4. Still photo of a 1 cm black character on a bright white computer screen is about the resolution limit of this sorry app. So if you want to read huge print for nearly blind, this app might help, otherwise save your money.