Sogou Travel Translation Treasure evaluates hand-held artifacts that can be translated through photos.

IT 168 Evaluation Nowadays, traveling abroad has become more and more normal. Every year, a large number of tourists go abroad to see the outside world, but the language barrier is always the biggest problem for Chinese people to travel abroad. With the continuous development of science and technology, especially the maturity of artificial intelligence technology, the field of machine language translation is developing rapidly at present, and it has become a reality to break the global language barrier by relying on intelligent devices. At the beginning of this year, sogou, a domestic AI technology company, released the intelligent translator "sogou Travel Translation Treasure", which was officially launched in JD.COM Mall on March 12. Today, I will send you the evaluation of this product and some related experiences.

▲ sogou Tourism Translation Treasure

Brief introduction of intelligent translation machine

Previously, there have been many applications of online translation on the Internet, among which the translation products of search engines are the most widely used. Now online translation can be realized by installing the App on the mobile phone, but there are still great defects in using the mobile App for translation. The first is to rely on the network. When traveling abroad, the network environment is even unknown, so it is still difficult to realize real-time online translation. Another reason is the poor speech recognition ability of outdoor translators, which is also caused by the hardware of the mobile phone itself.

▲ Back camera

Search the translation machine on the Internet, and you will find that there are quite a variety. Among them, there are simple translation devices that rely on mobile App for online reprinting. This kind of intelligent translation headset has no essential change compared with mobile App translation; There are also more intelligent independent hand-held translation devices, such as small translators and just released travel translation treasures. These products are designed with strong speech recognition ability and optimized for online translation.

With traveling abroad becoming a simple consumer product, more and more manufacturers are now paying attention to the intelligent translation machine market. With the surge of travel demand, the market for devices that can intelligently recognize speech and perform real-time translation is considered to be growing in the future.

external

Sogou tourism translation treasure is small in size. At first glance, it looks like an audio player. It adopts the integrated aluminum alloy body technology that is common in metal mobile phones, and adopts the special R-angle cutting technology. Because of its small size, the overall weight is only1.28g. ..

The front adopts a 3. 1 inch screen, which is not only convenient to operate, but also can display the translated content, and read the translated information through the screen in an inaudible and noisy environment to support information review. You can play the translated voice repeatedly by clicking the translated area on the screen, which can be realized in both online and offline modes.

The radio and the play key protrude on the right side of the fuselage, with long key stroke and good feedback. There is a photo button (with a camera icon on it) on the top of the fuselage, which will jump directly to the photo translation interface after being pressed. The position of the volume button is slightly awkward, at the bottom of the fuselage, but it is not used very often.

▲ The radio and the play button are on the side.

▲ The volume control key is at the bottom of the fuselage.

▲ Photo button at the top

multilingual translation

It is said that one of the basic functions of the translator is the voice translation function. To be different from other types of translation machines on the market, enhancing the experience is an essential option. Sogou Travel Translation Treasure has been improved in translation content, radio equipment and off-line translation.

In terms of translation content, sogou provides online translation in 18 languages including Chinese, and supports online translation in Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Finnish and Swedish. These languages have covered most countries and regions in the world, and users can basically not worry about the language problems of travel.

▲ Multilingual translation

▲ Multilingual translation

Offline translation mode

In fact, when traveling, you often encounter situations where there is no wireless network or the network conditions are not good. In this case, mobile phones and most smart devices basically lose their meaning of existence. At this time, the advantages of the offline mode of sogou travel translation are highlighted. In the absence of network connection, Chinese-English translation can be realized directly, and it can still play a certain role at critical moments. Although it is not as accurate as online voice translation, it is not a problem to meet daily ordinary communication. At present, there are few smart devices on the market that can support offline translation. After all, it still needs a lot of technical support to realize this function. It should be noted here that sogou Travel Translation Bao can't support translation in a network-free environment except English for the time being. In the future, this function may be improved through software update to further improve the accuracy of offline voice translation.

Since it is translation, accurate speech recognition ability is of course essential. Sogou's products adopt dual microphone array design in hardware, which has a good foundation for environmental noise reduction and vocal gain. In terms of software, sogou currently has more than 97% speech recognition technology, which can basically guarantee the recognition of Chinese. After testing, the recognition rate of this product for English and Japanese is also considerable. Although mistakes will be made, they will basically not affect the overall sentence meaning.

▲ Support offline mode

Real photo translation

In addition to outbound travel and language exchange, there are actually some problems in reading, such as the menu of ordering food. I have no idea what it is written, and I can see street signs, signs and menus that I can't understand everywhere. At this time, most people will use mobile phone queries to solve problems.

Sogou Travel Translation Bao adopts the optical character recognition technology developed by sogou, and accurately recognizes the real information by taking pictures, thus completing the translation of the text content in the pictures. Press the photo button at the top to enter this mode. When taking a picture, the screen will display a prompt line. Try to keep the text parallel to the line before shooting.

▲ photo translation

After taking a picture, the tourism translator will use the picture modification technology to quickly press the translated text on the original picture, which will really make it more convenient to see the menu. After the actual test, the photo translation function can also be completed for large paragraphs of English articles. However, there are still some problems in the understanding of sentence meaning. After all, the paragraph is too long, even Google Translation can't achieve it perfectly. However, in contrast, the combination of simple words such as menus and street signs will not cause much problem, and it can fully meet the daily use needs for general travel.

Other functions

Real-time exchange rate conversion, shopping is an essential option for outbound travel. Of course, people still have some scruples about buying goods abroad. How much to sell in the end, the tax rebate discount must be asked, and then the key exchange rate is converted. After all, everyone still has the most confidence in spending RMB. Sogou Translate Bao can directly obtain the user's country when online, manually select the country when offline, and convert the local currency in real time. If used well, it can also be used to bargain.

▲ Real-time exchange rate conversion

Emergency telephone function, which can update local emergency telephones in the networked state, including Fei Jing, fire, medical emergency and traffic accidents, as well as the contact information of China's local embassy. Manual selection and automatic positioning can directly obtain the relevant emergency telephone numbers of travel destinations.

▲ Real-time display of local telephone contact information.

▲ Support for calling

abstract

In fact, the translation machine is helpful to those users who want to travel. After all, foreign language communication is still difficult for most people in China. The translator can use various daily functions such as voice translation and picture translation. Portable body, offline Chinese-English translation and shooting mode can be said to be the three characteristics of this product.

▲ sogou Tourism Translation Treasure

At present, some speech recognition may still have a certain error rate, but it is believed that this will be improved gradually with the increase of data volume and the improvement of software. I hope that the wireless mode can support the translation of more languages, so that everyone can really communicate without worry.