Word Lens–an app that originally launched on iOS 4 years ago–and its parent company, Quest Visual, are now under the ownership of Google according to a post of Quest Visual’s website. The app, which translates words seen through a smartphone camera and displays them on-screen in real time, wasn’t released on Android for almost two years after originally being touted for use with the iPhone 3GS.
Interestingly enough, this app was recently featured in Apple’s “Powerful” ad, a TV promotion which showed a variety of applications and their “powerful” uses when paired with an iPhone 5s. Other apps shown in the below TV spot include Luminair, AmpliTube, and StarWalk.
The announcement in full, as posted at Quest Visual:
With Word Lens, we’ve seen the beginnings of what’s possible when we harness the power of mobile devices to “see the world in your language.”
By joining Google, we can incorporate Quest Visual’s technology into Google Translate’s broad language coverage and translation capabilities in the future.
As a thank you to everybody who supported us on our journey, we’ve made both the app and the language packs free to download for a limited time while we transition to Google.
We’re looking forward to continuing our work at Google – stay tuned!
Even more interesting regarding this transition is that the application, on top of being featured in the above advertisement, is listed on Apple’s website on a page created for the ad itself along with all of the other apps featured in the ad.
The good news is that Google won’t likely be pulling Word Lens from the App Store. While Apple doesn’t currently have any apps published to the Play Store, Google has more than 30 counting just the iPhone; this will likely be just another addition to that huge number.
Why was the app acquired by Google? There hasn’t been any official word yet, but it’s said that the Word Lens team will be joining Google Translate. Notably, and potentially something that spurred this acquisition, is that the Word Lens team recently launched an app for Google Glass.
How do you feel about Word Lens being picked up by Google?
[via 9to5Mac]
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