Hanzi mobile scanner

[rav]

Hi Everyone!

I am looking for mobile app to help me find the hanzi without opening book doctioonary.

Does anyone of you know or can recommend mobile application that allows scanning hanzi e.g. from newspaper and translate it into pinyin?

It`s very similar to QR codes scanner. I was searching net, but can not find it.

Looking for your early reply

Regards

Rafal

[renzhe]

Plecodict does this, but it's a paid add-on (the basic version of Pleco is free).

http://www.pleco.com/ipmanual/ocr.html

[jasoninchina]

For those of you who have used Pleco for this, how well does it work? And, I know it's on designed for type, but how often can it recognize handwritten characters?

[jinetic]

I just bought the pleco OCR add-on it works pretty well on black and white text. If the text is fancy it will fail like if it has a border it will also fail if the background is colored say on youtube subtitles. It wont work on handwritten text per the pleco website help file. Pleco also have a hand written recognition where you can trace the characters on an image manually painstaking as it is it works as an alternative. I will say that the OCR works if the text is on a solid background pretty well.

You can demo it to see if the charicter will show up when you run it to see if it will work for your particular application.

[gato]

Handwriting is too varied to be recognizable by OCR, I think. I doubt there is any program that can recognize handwriting in English, let alone Chinese.

Pleco works very well on printed words.

[Gymnosopher]

I have seen Pleco being used and it does seem to jump around a bit when held in hand - so perhaps is a little difficult to hold perfectly still over a text to go through that quickly.

Perhaps there is a free one somewhere, I've seen a Chinese friend use an app going the other way round into English (which seems a little less necessary if you know the alphabet but still) which was free (a quick search gives this App Store - 有道词典本地增强版 Youdao Dictionary Professional Edition but that's now the one) - but then perhaps Chinese app makers wouldn't see the need for for that?

I use an iPod without camera so I haven't really looked into this though.

[Lin Ai]

The app China Googles might do what you need (Apple App Store link). It does "live" look up or you can use a photo. It seems to recognize traditional characters, but will only give pinyin and English definition for simplified characters. It can be kind of tricky to get focused on the characters you want. I think Pleco is probably better (I've only tried the demo version of the OCR), but China Googles is free (for now at least), so it might be worth a try.

[jasoninchina]

I've been searching around for a few minutes, looking for other options. Here they are: google goggles, china goggles, and camdictionary.

[rav]

Hi Everyone!

thanks a lot for your quick and valuable replies, I`ll try all the options You recommend

Best regards!

Rafal

[jasoninchina]

Ok, so I've been testing out China Goggles and Camdictionary. The short answer is that China Goggles is an OK app(free), good for single characters or single words. It has a lot of functionality but doesn't always come through with the answers quickly. On the other hand, Camdictionary is great all around. It's the best app I've seen for this. It's a paid app, I believe about $5, but can identify characters really quickly. You can download a free version which you can use some 300 times. I would recommend downloading both and trying them out.