Japan Goggles App Reviews

Complete rip-off, this app does not deliver on its promises. Other negative reviews are all correct: - Live view consistently crashes when activated. - Only works rarely on printed text, and the print must be fairly large. - The bounding box for selecting the text to translate is constrained around the center of the screen, but images auto-center when you drag their edges to the center - this makes it impossible to use the app on any text along the borders of the image. - When it does manage to correctly identify characters, the translations are usually far from correct. Version number was 2.5 when I bought it, but this app is barely ready for alpha testing.

The app at first appears to work well, but problems show up when trying to change settings. It got into a made where it would offer the chance to turn Vertical mode on, but turned it off as soon as I turned it on. It also went into rotated mode and wouldnt go back. It would be good to delete bad results from the history but everthing stays there filling the list with failures. This version has limited functionality, if the developers decide to fix the problems above, it may be useful in the future, but its not worth it now.

People are expecting miracles! It DOES work, but you need to be patient to learn how to use it well! This technology is amazing! It is not always accurate, but given a little time, it usually figures out the correct translation. I am surprised it does not have 5 stars. LOVE it.

This app crashes when using the live camera option on the 3GS - briefly turns on and then crashes.

Dont buy!

Doesnt work correctly at all. Ive used it with multiple characters, not one has been correct.

I sell antiquarian books, and purchased this app specifically to translate the title of a 40s military text. What I found, I could have predicted if I had thought it through. The program works very well with printed characters, but has great difficulty with script. this should not surprise us, as the script oftimes resembles art (calligraphy) rather than the printed form. The interface is pretty amazing. You can scan with a live feed, or take a picture. If you take a picture (this all happens directly in the program), you can resize and reposition not only the text you photographed, but the window in which the program analyzes the text. I am guessing the folks who downrated the program were using earlier versions, or simply did not understand the complexities of the task. You must also remember that, with most characters having a range of meanings, the program can not necessarily produce a literal, logical translation. As a result, the program has not got the utility I had expected. That is my fault, as I had not used such a prgram before, and therefore was not cognizant of the limitations inherent in this type of programming. This is worth 5 stars simply for the pleasure of using such a well thought out app. I think that with more time, I can produce a decent translation of the printed text I need. Pretty cool, when you think about what I am asking Japan Goggles to accomplish.

I have posters with Japanese text to translate. I bought 3-4 photo translation iPhone programs for the job. I took a photo of the text and used photoshop to isolate the radicals and improve their black and white contrast to help the OCR process. I put those enhanced photos in my iPhone. In the end, a different program did the bulk of the work. I gave this program 1 star because it helped with only 1 single phrase out of dozens. * The biggest issue is a very poor OCR. it just does not select correct radicals nor does it offer any correct alternatives. * The text select box is difficult to align on text because the corner handles shrink/expand all 4 sides at once. * You can not expand the text select box to the edge of the photo if the text is near the edge. * The green rotate icon is in a bad place which causes aggravation. Once you maticulously slide the photo, align the text box properly and get a bad OCR you try, try again. - IF - you get 1 or 2 radicals to properly OCR your finger might touch the green rotate button and...... "ARRG! STUPID DANG PROGRAM!" I dont believe the source text (Radicals) are the problem because a different program did a much better OCR job. I would save your $ and look elsewhere.

I have been using this program with images of manga and while it doesnt find every character it does get most (8-9/10). Compared to imputing them via radical search its much faster. Only five bucks and its saved me a few hours of work so far. Cons: I have had an error where the app wouldnt rescan after first scan. I reinstalled the app and havent had that problem since. Also, as previously mentioned the rotation button/scroll thing does get accidentally used a bit. Overall it doesnt work perfect but it does help if you know how to use it. Definitely worth five dollars.

This apps live OCR isnt as good as Plecos Chinese OCR and cant translate entire words consisting of multiple characters. HOWEVER it is helpful for looking up individual Kanji while reading printed text. You need to hold the camera still, 10cm straight above the Kanji in question. With some practice, this app can save you lots of time versus using another e-dictionary. Patience!

I bought this for a recent trip to Japan despite the negative reviews. I was hoping the bad reviews were exaggerated. Alas, they were not. The app claims to recognize words, but I found it rarely was able to decipher more than one character at a time. It is extremely picky about the photo, if you happen to get an edge or some other line in the photo, it throws off the translation. For academic purposes only, Id imagine. Or for folks with a lot of free time.

I dont often review but this app worked surprisingly well for me so I felt it deserved an accolade. The OCR doesnt seem to like colored or inverted(white on black) text, However on black on white typeset writing it returned around 80% accurate, On handwritten and stylized writing it returned from 20% to 40% accurate. Over all quite impressive for an app that doesnt outsource its OCR functions.

Tried using on some products received from Japan. App is insufficient at translating small text. Would not recommend this app at all.

Its make it so easy for me to learn new kanji character I very love this program.

It works ridiculously well! Im seriously considering getting an iPhone just for this app, since my ipod touch can barely focus on anything and this OS is too brain dead to easily transfer files from a real camera to it.

I went to this store called Daiso Japan and my mom bought me this notebook with paper with cute characters on the paper (Im 9) but everything was in japanese (Its very colorful) and i didnt know what it said, so i looked for a translator app and it was to hard to look for every character so I looked for a app where I can just take a picture and it would translate so i downloaded this app and…IT DIDNT WORK AT ALL!!!

One star for effort, but this app cant recognize even the most common characters, and jumps back and forth between displays of what it thinks it sees, but all are mostly wrong in whole or in part. Totally useless!

That. Is. All.

Great Idea in theory. I hope you guys release an update soon!

It gets even common characters and phrases wrong.