Pleco announcements: OCR + Android + Classical

[mikelove]

We've just announced three big new features for our Chinese dictionary software.

• OCR - in the next major version of Pleco on iPhone it will be possible to look up characters instantly by just pointing your iPhone's camera at them. This is "live" (similar to an augmented reality system) so there's no tedious taking a picture / cropping / etc involved; you just point your camera at the word and a definition pops up. Demo video
  (or here if you can't access YouTube). iPhone 4 / 3GS only (though we're holding out hope that the next iPod Touch will have a camera too), requires iOS 4, hopefully available sometime in September as a paid add-on.
  
• Android - we're finally developing an Android version of Pleco; should have all of the features from our iPhone software except OCR (we want to make sure it's actually a success on iPhone first, plus we're worried Google may come out with an identical product themselves given that they've been moving in that direction with Google Goggles). Public beta-test hopefully by the end of the year (read: New Year's Eve at 11:59pm in whatever time zone is immediately east of the International Date Line); it may not include flashcards or document reader initially but it should at least include all of our dictionaries and full-screen handwriting.
  
• Classical Chinese - we've finally licensed a Classical Chinese dictionary, 古汉语大辞典 by 上海辞书出版社 - big / complicated title to convert but we're hoping to have that out by next summer.
  

(full announcement email is here)

[roddy]

Oh man, that Youtube video . . . kids today don't know how easy they've got it. Excellent stuff, thanks for the update.

[parmarossa]

The Chinese character "reader" is amazing. Originally was looking at buying one of those "reader pens" - but this looks fantastic..It's a huge problem for learners, like myself, to read newspapers (guess pronounciation, look up word in dictionary - if wrong, guess again), so this new technology will be a killer product. Congratulations!

[gato]

Hurray for finally getting a Classical Chinese dictionary (looks like the one I recommended ;) ), and everything else!

[mikelove]

Oh man' date=' that Youtube video . . . kids today don't know how easy they've got it.[/quote']

Heh, yeah, if this proves popular we may soon have people talking about how back when they were learning Chinese they had to make do with just handwriting input in their portable electronic Chinese dictionaries :-)

(we're actually just about at the point now where people who used Pleco on Palm to study Chinese back when they were in college could theoretically have children now who themselves are old enough to start studying Chinese, though I haven't actually heard of any second-generation Pleco users yet - that'll be a very fun email to get, though)

The Chinese character "reader" is amazing. Originally was looking at buying one of those "reader pens" - but this looks fantastic..It's a huge problem for learners' date=' like myself, to read newspapers (guess pronounciation, look up word in dictionary - if wrong, guess again), so this new technology will be a killer product. Congratulations![/quote']

Thanks! I was actually tempted to reply to the recent topic about those here, but I didn't know how I could do so without pretty much giving away the whole secret :-) One of my biggest annoyances with those pens has been that when they don't work, you have to switch to an entirely different book / device to look up a character some other way, so it's nice to be able to build OCR into an app that also has handwriting / Pinyin / radical lookups as a fallback.

Hurray for finally getting a Classical Chinese dictionary (looks like the one I recommended )' date=' and everything else![/quote']

Yep, thanks a lot for that recommendation - also nice to have a relationship with 上海辞书出版社, since maybe if things work well we'd have a chance at being able to license 辞海 a few years down the line. But in the meantime it's a really nice comprehensive Classical dictionary, and we're hoping that having one readily available might help encourage some people to try learning Classical who haven't before.

[muirm]

It looks awesome, straight out of the movies!

How well does the OCR work on handwriting/artsy printing?

[Duncan Leung]

Yes! Finally =D

I've been waiting for this announcement for .... forever =p (okay, not forever, but I'm still really happy to hear this!)

Btw, if I have a Pleco license for my WM phone, is there a way to port it over so that I can just install a license on a new Android phone? I really can't stand WM anymore =(

[giraffe]

Well I am thrilled to hear about the Android port although I'll be anxiously waiting for the flashcard feature to be added, since that's my main use case.

Pleco is the centre of my Chinese universe right now and Android is, by far, my first choice in smartphones (and I'll probably get an Android tablet in a few months) so this is big win for me.

[Duncan Leung]

I've never actually used the flashcards feature- I should read about how to use them =)

[mikelove]

How well does the OCR work on handwriting/artsy printing?

It doesn't, really - might work with a very popular artsy font, or if you write extremely neatly, but it's basically only for regular printed text. Nobody seems to have figured out yet how to recognize Chinese handwriting / calligraphy without actually recording the strokes as people draw them, though we're hoping they do figure that out in the future.

Btw, if I have a Pleco license for my WM phone, is there a way to port it over so that I can just install a license on a new Android phone? I really can't stand WM anymore =(

Yes, it should be a free transfer actually - we're not actually going to guarantee that until the finished product is ready (since there's still a slightly chance that we might run into a major problem that required us to license some new thingamajig to get our Android version working that would require us to pay per-copy royalties, or that Google might change its distribution policies in such a way that we'd no longer be able to openly distribute an Android app from which they didn't receive a commission), but it's very very likely that you'll be able to move Palm/WM (and even iPhone) licenses over for free.

Pleco is the centre of my Chinese universe right now and Android is, by far, my first choice in smartphones (and I'll probably get an Android tablet in a few months) so this is big win for me.

Thanks! I'd be a little wary of buying a first-generation Android tablet, though; there's a big difference between optimizing software for a 4-inch screen and a 9-inch screen, in fact there's even a pretty big difference between a 6-inch screen and a 9-inch screen, and Android's display-scaling system can only do so much; it's very likely that one form factor will eventually dominate the Android tablet market, and since apps will be optimized around it, that's the form factor you're probably going to want to get.

I've never actually used the flashcards feature- I should read about how to use them =)

They're a little intimidating for non-technical types, though they're a bit less so on iPhone than on Palm/WM and we're continuing to improve them on iPhone; hopefully by the time they make it to Android they'll finally be accessible without having to look through the instruction manual.

[deathtrap]

I'm in love with that OCR feature. It's so slick, but unfortunately I only have an iPhone 3G Is there any hope, ever, for that feature to be supported on the iPhone 3G?

[muirm]

The OCR feature is a shoo-in to be featured in an iPhone "there's an app for that" commercial (if they are still making them).

[mikelove]

I'm in love with that OCR feature. It's so slick, but unfortunately I only have an iPhone 3G Is there any hope, ever, for that feature to be supported on the iPhone 3G?

Unlikely: the 3G can't focus closely enough to be used to scan text; if you try holding it up to a piece of Chinese text as in the video you'll see that pretty much all you get are amorphous blobs where the characters are supposed to be.

The OCR feature is a shoo-in to be featured in an iPhone "there's an app for that" commercial (if they are still making them).

Thanks! I haven't seen any of those in a while, but honestly I'd be happy if they'd just give us *some* sort of featured placement in iTunes - the Engadget link from yesterday temporarily launched us all the way up to the #12 download slot among all free reference apps (in the US store) but we still couldn't break into the "What's Hot" list.